


Leonard Snart Shorts

by icewhisper



Series: Leonard Snart Shorts [1]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-28 18:37:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 28
Words: 21,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10837056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: A collection of prompt/meme/headcanon replies from my writing blog,leonardsnartwrites. Replies will range in length, ships (romantic or gen), and ratings. Warnings and tags will be added as they come.





	1. Gangsters AU [Rogue Canary] - Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Gangsters AU Rouge Canary

Leonard Snart built an empire in Central.

The city had been dying since before he was born, taken to pieces by corrupt cops and even worse politicians, but it was his home. He’d watched the Families rule it for years, calculating eyes disregarded, because no one took a child seriously. Suggestions were met with his father’s fist and cold iron pressed between his eyes. Warnings and threats ruled his life as surely as the fear of any of it falling on his sister.

He protected Lisa more than he protected himself, but Mick picked up the slack with fists, blood, and a loyalty Leonard hadn’t known could exist outside of the bond between siblings.

“We’re going to be partners,” he decided when they were fourteen and he never let Mick go after that. They took Central by the time they were twenty, stealing it from the Families the same way they’d steal trinkets when they got bored. Blood still got spilled and bodies put in the ground, but it was Leonard standing in the end with Mick and Lisa by his side.

He gave Mick a ring as his partner watched a formerly-Santini warehouse burn and wondered if it worked as a marriage proposal.

They made things official when Mick put a matching ring on Len’s finger, but they never exchanged words or put it to paper. They didn’t need legality when the city knew who ruled them. To mess with one was to mess with the other and no one wanted to face the consequences that brought.

The Lances came into his territory with scared eyes and calling him the lesser of the evils. A mother at the end of her rope. A father that loved his family, but couldn’t find his way out of the bottle. An older daughter that was getting too close to the mob war between the Queens and the Merlyns. A younger daughter with a fire in her eyes that said she was going to be trouble.

Central saved their family from the hell Star City would have put it through, but Sara never lost the gleam in her eye. Innocence gave way to strength and a cunningness her family couldn’t have predicted. She drifted close to Len and Mick, sidling up to them in bars when she was old enough and playing with a fire that was as ironic as it wasn’t.

They took her in every way they could, but Len was the one that got attached first, drawn in by the same gut feeling he’d had when he met Mick so many years ago. Mick was slower to let her in, but as they lay together in bed after, fingers trailing down sweaty spines and twisting around blonde hair, Len knew Mick was hooked.

They didn’t exchange words, but Len gave Mick a look that got a grunt in response and they sealed it with a kiss that was more possessive than anything. Each other. Sara. She came alive under them—and over when she shoved Len onto his back and Mick held his wrists—nails raking down skin until she’d left her mark on scarred bodies.

Star City died in a tidal wave of bombs, blood, and bodies that left the Merlyns as the victor. The smart ones gathered their families and fled. The desperate ones followed the Queens to Coast City. The foolhardy stayed under Merlyn-rule until no one could save them.

Meanwhile, Central thrived under sticky hands, flames, and knives.


	2. Overprotective Dad!Len [Captain Canary] - Rated K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Randomdcrambles prompt: Snart being an overprotective dad over he and Sara's daughter when she gains interest in Barry's son.

 “I’m still a criminal,” Leonard reminded Sara when the test came back positive, because it was the truth. A stint with the Legends—including the one where they all thought he was dead—and helping out the heroes when it benefitted him didn’t change the fact that he’d practically been born with lock-picks in his hand.

Change was one thing Sara had never asked of him, taking what he was at face value the same way he took her. They took each other—pasts and all—and maybe that was why they worked. Her father still twitched at the age difference and at Leonard in general, but he seemed to have accepted the fact that Sara had made her choice. He’d still kissed her cheek and passed her off to him at their little courthouse wedding.

Neither of them mentioned Quentin’s attempts to threaten Leonard against ever hurting his baby girl or the way Leonard snorted and wasn’t scared at all. They both knew Sara was fully capable of killing Leonard herself if he raised a hand. Leonard never mentioned that he’d sooner kill himself than turn into Lewis.

The pregnancy came a couple years later when Len was drifting closer to fifty than not and Sara looked at him like she knew it. They didn’t talk about the hesitations or expectations. He still stole. She still flip-flopped between moonlighting as the White Canary and teaching martial arts at a gym in Central.

Abigail Laurel Snart was born on a disgustingly hot day in July; a month early and while Leonard was elbow-deep in a jewelry store’s safe.

He was late when he got there, ignoring disapproving looks from everyone else and solely focused on Sara and the little bundle in her arms. The size didn’t shock him—he’d gotten dragged to the birth of Barry’s terror twins six months before—and there wasn’t any earth-moving moment when he looked at her. She was just…theirs.

“You’re late,” Sara said with a tired smile, but she’d known exactly where he was.

He pulled a gold chain from his pocket, heart pendant hanging from the end, and winked. “I was getting her a gift.”

(They’d put that necklace on her when she was old enough to not try eating it and she never took it off again.)

 

 

“Don’t you think it’s time to hang up the cold gun?” Barry asked when Abby was nine and Len had just gotten out of a two-year prison sentence.

“You didn’t hang up your fetish gear.”

“It’s not fetish gear, Snart!” Barry sputtered as his face went red.

Len raised an eyebrow. “I don’t do domestic,” he said rather than tell the hero he’d heard the stories Iris told Sara.

“You’re a dad now.”

“Your son just flashed onto the roof.”

“I- Donnie!”

 

 

“I’m not going straight,” he said one day when she caught him going over blueprints.

“You could never do straight, Len,” she laughed. “No blueprints on the dinner table.”

He knew the rule. Hell, he’d been the one to bring it up in the first place, because he didn’t want Abby learning things the way he had, and he had an office that Abby understood was off limits. His plans stayed behind locked doors.

Except for the days when Donnie Allen came over without his sister and his daughter started giggling like a schoolgirl. Those days, the plans and cold gun stayed in full display.

He never threatened Donnie outright. Sara would skin him alive for falling back on an archaic practice, because Abby was his kid, but she wasn’t his property.

“She’s our kid,” Sara would remind him. “If you threaten him, she’ll probably marry him just to spite you.”

So he worked at the kitchen table, cold gun within reach and plans in full view. Donnie was already developing the same twitch his father got when he found out Len was planning another job.

“I don’t like him,” he told Sara after the kids had left.

“You wouldn’t like anyone she dated.” Sara shook her head. “Is this job going to get you arrested again?”

Len smirked. “There is no job. Mick burned this place down a decade ago.”

“You’re ridiculous.”


	3. Last Refuge; Missing Scene [Young!Sara & Leonard, gen] - Rated K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: In Last Refuge, I wanted to see interaction between young Sara and Leonard. Could you please write a fic??

He’d forgotten what he looked like as a baby. There had been pictures once, well-loved albums his mother had put together as she played housewife between his father’s prison sentences, but they’d all vanished after she died. He’d been too young to think of it then, still reeling from the loss and trying to understand why she wasn’t coming home.

Most days, he forgot what she looked like. He’d forgotten her smile years ago, the sound of her voice even sooner. These days, the only thing he remembered was an old lullaby and the way she’d card her fingers through his curls when she called him her little lion.

She wouldn’t get to do that if they didn’t get the baby version of him back to the hospital.

He crossed his arms over his chest, fingers digging into his biceps, and leaned against the doorway. The younger Sara was holding him this time, swaying back and forth as she hummed some tune he didn’t recognize.

She was different, he thought, miles away from the Sara he shared barbs and bourbon with. Eons away from the Sara that always caught him when he cheated at cards. This one was innocent, still unmarred by the horrors the older her would go through. It felt cruel to toss them all back into lives where their futures went to shit, but they didn’t get a choice. Rip’s little hideaway would keep them safe for now, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. The timeline would set eventually. They had to be back before that.

The baby in her arms fussed, arms free of the blanket he’d been swaddled in, and Sara’s humming stopped. “Shh,” she murmured. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“Don’t let the face fool you,” he said, “I was a handful.”

She spun around, startled, clutching the newborn to her chest. “You’re… This is you?” she asked, eyes running over his body before falling back to the child in her arms. “Mick was watching him. He just…needed a break.”

He already knew that. He’d seen the two Micks around in another hallway, the younger one staring at a flame and the older one handing down wisdom Len hadn’t lingered long enough to hear. It hadn’t been his business and if trying to change his own past told him anything, he knew Mick’s advice wouldn’t work. “He try anything with you?”

“No. He’s been quiet. He mostly just watched you,” she paused and glanced down at the newborn, “this you.”

Unsurprising, Len thought. For all his bolstering, Mick had always been more attracted to the flame than anything else. “Catch him in the left knee if he tries,” he told her, though, because he remembered Mick after the fire—the way he’d self-destructed and the people that had gotten hurt when they got too close, “the joint’s weak.”

She nodded, frowning at him. “You two are criminals, right? But you’re working with the good guys?”

“We have our reasons,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure what they were anymore.

“You’ll get us home, though? My family… They don’t know where I am. My dad’s probably worried sick.”

He let himself smile at her, some soft and reassuring thing he used to give Lisa when he’d tell her everything would be okay. “Yeah,” he said, “we’ll get you home. Just don’t go bashing my head into any doorways.”

She huffed out a laugh and shook her head. “You have any advice about how to calm him down?”

His eyes fell down to the baby whose fussing was about to go into a full-blown meltdown. Tiny hands reaching and grasping for nothing and everything, and he felt something in his chest tighten. “You know Somewhere Over The Rainbow?”

“Yeah?”

“Sing that. He’ll be asleep before you’re done.”

She thanked him as he turned his back, but he could hear the lyrics before he rounded the corner.


	4. Birds & The Bees [Coldwave & Lisa] - K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lacommunarde prompt: Coldwave, Len and Mick giving Lisa the birds and the bees talk

**Coldwave, Len and Mick giving Lisa the birds and the bees talk**

The question came while Mick was getting dinner ready and Len was sneaking a slice of cucumber, which he promptly choked on when Lisa spoke up behind them and asked, “Are you two gonna have a baby?”

Len spun towards the sink, hacking until he dislodged the food from his windpipe, and looked at his sister with wide eyes. “ _What_?”

She giggled—baby psychopath that she was—and looked at them innocently. It was a lie. For all the sweet smiles and pigtails she’d literally nagged Len into learning how to do, she was a little demon. Mick said she got it from Len. Len was vaguely offended.

“Are you gonna have a baby?” she asked again, but she was pointedly looking at Len and his belly. Which, fine, so he’d gained a little weight since Mick moved in and made it his life’s mission to stuff him like a Thanksgiving turkey, but _pregnant_?

“No,” he sputtered and cast a panicked look towards Mick.

Mick was no help. He was too busy looking like he was torn between horror and laughing his ass off.

“Katie’s parents are kissing all the time and, now, she’s gonna have a little sister,” Lisa continued like her brother wasn’t having a minor nervous breakdown. “You and Mick kiss all the time.” In the privacy of their cramped little bedroom, damn it. He needed to have a talk with her about boundaries and _knocking_.

“Men can’t have babies, Lisa,” he told her instead with a forced calm. He could see where the conversation was going, could see it like a big, flashing sign, and he didn’t want to have this talk with her. She was ten and this crap wasn’t supposed to be his responsibility, but her mom had walked out and no one was ever going to get a sex talk from Lewis.

“Why not?”

“We don’t have the… We just can’t.”

“Why not?”

Mick snorted and Len shot him a dark look. A year ago, he would have turned Lisa towards Mick instead, because he had experience giving the damn talk, but there were fires and people that weren’t there anymore and he didn’t. He straightened his back instead and cursed Central City’s horrible school systems for not teaching kids anything.

What came next was by far the most horrific conversation he’d ever had with his sister—with anyone, really, and that included the humiliating talk with Mick’s mother when she caught them in bed that one time. Mick guffawed when he stammered his way to the part about _parts_ and Len contemplated punching him.

“You have sex when you love someone,” he told her, even though it was advice he’d never stuck to in the past. He never put much stock in emotional connections, but one pregnancy scare in high school was enough to make him feel like he was developing an ulcer. He didn’t want his sister anywhere near something like that.

She tilted her head at him. “Do you love Mick?”

Mick went silent.

Len’s heart stuttered in his chest.

He was already in one conversation he didn’t want to be having. Talking about his feelings for Mick… They hadn’t even talked about it properly yet, more content to agree that they didn’t want anybody else right now and that was enough. He was good with that and he thought Mick was too, but talking about them and love… It wasn’t a talk to have in front of Lisa.

“That’s between me and Mick, Lis,” he told her, voice soft, but his eyes stayed on Mick.

“So you’re not gonna have a baby?”

“No.”

She nodded and hopped off the chair. “Okay. I’m gonna go watch TV,” she announced before she walked out of the kitchen, effectively declaring the talk over.

He sank down into the chair she’d just vacated, put his head in his hands, and groaned, long and suffering. “I’m never having kids.”

“Really? Because I thought you did great,” Mick said with way too much humor. “I loved the part about bees sometimes liking bees or birds liking birds.”

“ _Mick_.”


	5. "You're going to be okay." [Coldwave] - Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robininthelabyrinth meme: Coldwave, first bullet point of the hurt meme [“I got you. It’s gonna be okay, you’re going to be okay.”]

_“I got you. It’s gonna be okay, you’re going to be okay.”_

He could hear Mick, somewhere behind the blood rushing in his ears, his heart pounding in his chest, and the complete and total _panic_ , he could hear his partner repeating the same words. Over and over again, he said them until words blended together and got interrupted by hiccups, because Mick was crying too. He could feel the way Mick’s hands shook against him, just as fucking terrified as Len was, but at least he could feel it.

He couldn’t feel his legs.

Blood leaked past his lips when he coughed out Mick’s name, weak hands around a burned wrist, and he wanted to tell him it was okay. He wanted to tell him he wasn’t scared (a lie) and that Mick needed to get out of there ( _please, please, please don’t leave me_ ), but the words got lost somewhere between his brain and his mouth.

He was pretty sure he was drowning in his own blood.

He didn’t remember what happened. A mission with the Legends, a one-off, because they’d _left_. The team broke time, but saved him, and he’d endured the welcome back hugs that made his skin crawl and his anxiety skyrocket, because they’d all known it was goodbye. Him and Mick packed up and went home, because stealing across time wasn’t worth the way it had kept tearing them to pieces.

A person. A gun. Mick shot them down with the cold gun, because his own was lying in pieces somewhere near the rocks.

Fallen.

They’d fallen.

Or Len had. He definitely knew he had, even if he couldn’t remember _how_. He remembered Mick crashing to his knees beside him and screaming through the comms that they needed backup, that Len was hurt.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Mick said again, but it sounded more like he was pleading than reassuring him.

They never should have come back. No matter how desperate the team was, they never should have left that too-big house they’d settled into. Mick had jokingly called it Hotel Rogues for the way their little band of criminals cycled through it.

He wanted to go home, walls broken down enough that he might have even said it aloud if it weren’t for the blood filling his lungs. He met Mick’s eyes instead and pretended the edges weren’t graying out.

“We’re gonna get you back to the ship,” Mick promised, lips pressed to a torn and bloody hand. “They’re coming. You gotta stay awake, boss.”

He didn’t think anyone was coming, not if there were still enough threats that Mick was shooting people dead at the base of a cliff. Too many threats and the timeline came first. They couldn’t stop the battle to drag him back to the ship.

“Boss, open your eyes. Lenny, _please_ …”

Len tried. He tried so damn hard, because he could hear the way Mick’s voice was cracking, but he couldn’t do it. He was so tired.

 

 

He woke up in the bed at their house, throat parched and brain fuzzy.

Mick was by his side in a second with ice cubes to wet his lips and hands to hold him up. “It’s fine,” he said. “You’re fine. Gideon fixed you up.”

“Home…”

“You’ve been out for a while,” he explained. “Figured you’d wanna wake up here.” Something flickered across his eyes—pain or guilt, Len wasn’t sure—and he thinned his lips. “Boss…”

He swallowed around a tongue that still felt like a desert. “The team…”

“They’re fine. Try and sleep.”

 

 

He realized later why Mick wanted him to keep sleeping, why he tried to coax him back to sleep every time he woke up. He didn’t want him to realize that Gideon hadn’t been able to fix all the damage, that some bones were just shattered beyond repair in the fall and that any attempt would have probably killed him.

He realized on the third day that he couldn’t feel his legs and, suddenly, he understood why they were in the office-turned-bedroom on the first floor instead of the master upstairs.

Mick didn’t say anything as he flipped his Zippo open and closed in a fast _click-click_ motion that Len knew was a nervous tick.

Neither of them mentioned the tears.


	6. Touch [Coldwave] - Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Len/Mick, Len is the boss outside, but at home he's Mick's pet kitty.  
> ( _Not_ animal play. This ended up being more of a metaphor about Len and touch.)

As a rule, they didn’t touch. Len steered clear of physical contact like a cat that had been kicked one too many times. He weaved through crowds like it was a dance, brushing people off with the backs of his hands and a tense spine. He glared at cops and shining silver cuffs and pretended his heart wasn’t pounding in his chest when fingers brushed bare skin.

Mick always spoke to him softly those days, talking about whatever came to mind until Len latched onto that instead of the overwhelming panic that made his breath short.

Sex came in scattered moments when what they both wanted outweighed the nerves. Mick kept his hands clear and let Len take the reins every time. On the worse days, where Len’s hands shook as they kissed and fingers fumbled until they couldn’t work the shirt buttons, Mick let his hands get bound over his head.

Len loved him a little bit more those days, because he knew it wasn’t Mick’s thing. He should have said the words— _thank you_ and _I love you_ and _I’m sorry I’m like this_ —but they never made it up his throat, trapped as they were behind lumps and emotional stunting. He made sarcastic comments and puns as easily as he breathed, but words that meant something…

He thought Mick still understood, sure his partner could see it reflecting beside the insecurities in his eyes and the shuddering of his breath.

Those days, Mick said his name with a weight like it was a reply to everything and a declaration that was bigger than both of them. It was how he’d proposed, cliché words absent as he grumbled out _Leonard_ with amusement and exasperation and nerves. A ring—the one he’d stolen in their first job and thought he lost as they moved between safe houses—on the table like a hint just in case Len hadn’t understood the question in how Mick said his name.

He had. He did. He always understood.

He steeled himself and let Mick put the ring on him, breathing through the weight on his chest as he laced their fingers together.

He thought that was why they worked—because Mick understood what Len could and couldn’t handle and let him take the lead on everything. He let him shape plans around the smallest amount of human interaction and got between physical contact when and if he could. Not always. Some things were just unavoidable. Mick understood. Mick _knew him_.

Mick knew the specific way Len’s fingers twitched sometimes and what it meant when Len’s eyes got that half-manic look that had nothing to do with touch and everything to do with the lack of it.

“Boss, c’mere,” Mick grumbled in the low tone that sounded like he was trying to placate a wild animal.

He looked over, teeth gnawing at the inside of his cheek.

“ _Lenny_ ,” he said this time and the fight left him in a breath. Mick only called him Lenny when he saw what Len didn’t like admitting. A code between the two of them, because they spoke in code and looks more than they didn’t.

He lifted a hand when Len laid himself across the couch, face buried in Mick’s lap. Len’s breath hitched when a heavy hand pressed down between his shoulder blades, pressure and confinement that lit up a panic in him that bled out into calmness. One hand on his back, the other stroking the short fuzz of his hair, Len let himself sink into it. In a few hours, he’d rise back out of it and start glaring at hands that came too close, but for right then, he let Mick take control.

Mick knew what he needed.

He always did.


	7. Babysitters AU [Coldwave] – Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Coldwave as babysitters AU.

Leonard was never having children.

The thought—knowledge, really—came when Lisa’s mother brought his sister home, cute and swaddled in a pink hospital blanket. He’d loved her on sight, a bone-deep knowledge that he’d give his life to protect that little girl if he had to, because the world and their father handed out nothing but hurt.

“Promise me you’ll take care of her,” her mother asked one day when her stomach had still been round and Lisa hadn’t entered the world yet, because Lewis was drinking again and they all knew what that meant. Len had promised, but it would be years before he understood that it was a promise too heavy for an eight-year-old to make. Most older siblings protected the younger ones from heartbreak and schoolyard bullies, but Len protected her from Lewis and hands that were never extended in love.

He took the bruises so she didn’t have to and lived with the guilt when he couldn’t.

She covered the scar on her shoulder so he couldn’t see it, because she knew how his gut churned whenever he caught a glimpse of damaged skin. Reminders made his breath short and no amount of telling him _it’s okay_ and _I’m fine_ and _I don’t blame you_ could make him feel better.

Still, she clung to him as they grew, shooting barbs back and forth like it was their own version of _I love you_ , because neither of them were good with voicing affection. Mick rolled his eyes whenever they did it, muttering words like _emotionally stunted_ that he definitely learned from his therapist and _pains in my ass_ that was definitely true.

“You think you’d ever want them?” Mick asked him one day while they were sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse and watching Lisa play tag with his siblings.

“No,” Len told him honestly, because he didn’t have it in him. Years-old fears of becoming his father would have been enough, but he’d already weathered the sex talk too early with Lisa and didn’t have the stomach to do it again.

Mick grunted in agreement. “Clara, tag with your freakin’ _hand_. Not your teeth,” he called out and grumbled, “you little fucking cannibal.”

Len choked on a laugh.

“Mark my words, she’s gonna end up like that fucking psycho in Milwaukee.”

“I don’t think she’s _that_ bad yet,” Len placated him, lips quirked up in a smile, “but if she does, you might want to tell your parents.”

“They’re too busy on the farm.” Which was fair. Mick had mentioned once that they’d hoped for a girl first, someone to help tend after the little ones while they worked the farm. They’d gotten Mick instead and he ended up pulling double duty, working the fields with his father in the morning before he traded places with his mom and got to work with the kids. Some days, it kept him too busy to think about fire. Others, it stressed him out until it was all he could think about.

“They’re too complicated, anyway,” Mick added as an afterthought. “Can’t plan heists when you’ve got a baby screaming in the other room.” He leaned over, chin propped on Len’s shoulder so he could peer at the plans in Len’s lap. “How’s that going?”

“Slowly,” he said and shrugged the touch off. “Keep an eye on them. Clara bit Matt again.”

“How did you… Fucking- Clara! Teeth!”

No, Len thought, he was never having kids.

(Years later, he ended up with a group of meta-human criminals with the maturity of kindergartners and exchanged a long-suffering look with Mick.)


	8. “Who did this to you?” [Coldwave] – Rated T

“Who did this to you?”

The words came in a sigh, guilt and anger warring as they churned his stomach, but it was a question Len didn’t need to ask. He’d watched Mick deteriorate over the months, moments caught in glimpses and reminders that this is what he’d left Mick to. He’d hit him on the head and had Sara carry him off to safety, but he hadn’t expected to see the aftermath. He’d expected heat and pain right before death hit.

He’d been right about the first two, heat and flames licking up his arm and feeling as if his fingers were actually melting over the failsafe instead of holding it. He’d felt the heat touch his cheek as the Time Masters stared at him in horror.

He hadn’t expected to wake up in a sea of green that made him feel weightless and heavy at the same time. Pained and numb. Lost and grounded.

The timeline was a living contradiction, he’d realized as he struggled to pull himself together. It preached—actually _preached_ , because time was a sentient shit that definitely new what it was doing—one thing while doing the other. It yearned for peace, but it created war. It offered healing for wounds that would never truly close.

He hated Time more and more as he started to see it as an entity instead of a concept.

He pulled himself back to Mick as he watched their lives happen all over again and let himself fall to pieces when he saw what the Time Masters had done to him. Tortured him. Broken him. Mick had come back afterwards, had broken free of the brainwashing and come back to _him_ , but Len had known deep in his gut that Mick wasn’t the same. He hadn’t understood it then. He wished he didn’t understand it now.

Time pulled him back every time he tried to talk to Mick. It didn’t care that Mick was hurting or that he was eating through his grief and stepping in front of bullets— _bullets_ , Mick—because time wanted to happen apparently meant that Time wanted to be a raging bitch.

Mick thought he was a hallucination and Len should have told him the truth, but the words stayed buried inside him. He didn’t know if there was a way to pull him out of the time stream or if doing it might actually finish the job the Oculus had started. He wasn’t ready to find out, not until he had a clearer answer.

He never should have appeared to Mick, though. He’d done it to try and give his partner—his _husband_ , damn it—something to hold onto, but it was like he’d only made it worse. Stein wasn’t taking him seriously and Mick was just…giving up. He was giving up and no one was helping him.

He hadn’t traded places with Mick just to watch him drive himself to an early grave.

Mick looked at him, green eyes bloodshot and darkened by the circles underneath. He looked older now, tired and worn in ways that Len had never seen him before.

“You,” he told Len, voice gravelly as he reached for another beer. The top came off with a crack and he brought it to his lips to take a long drink. “You did.”

It wasn’t anything Len hadn’t expected or been thinking, but it broke his heart anyway.


	9. Skating Lessons [Coldwave & Lisa] – Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lacommunarde prompt: Coldwave, Len taking Mick skating for the first time after hearing he's never been.

“No. No fuckin’ way,” Mick said as he stood at the edge of the rink. “What part of pyro did you miss? I do _fire_. This is the complete fuckin’ opposite.”

A mother to their left glared at him for his language and Len bit back the smile. Not every kid was swearing like a sailor by the time they hit second grade, but Lisa was special. He’d be more worried about it if he actually cared.

“You promised Lisa,” he reminded him, same as he had been since they drove to the rink and Mick realized it was public skate and definitely not the practice time Len had told him it was. The protests had gotten louder since Len forced him into a pair of rentals, but he’d gotten Mick over to the ice.

“ _I_ didn’t promise her jack shit,” Mick hissed at him, “I don’t skate, Lenny. I drive tractors, ride horses, and burn things. I don’t do those frilly-ass little spins in sparkly costumes.”

“You see me in a costume?”

“As much as I wanna see you in spandex, that ain’t the point,” Mick deadpanned and Len’s face heated up. “I’m not going out there.”

“Want me to hold your hand?” he asked and it was supposed to sound mocking and amused, but came out a little strangled. “You’ve been roller skating before.”

“ _Once_ ,” Mick stressed, “and I wasn’t balancing on a fuckin’ blade. And it’s cold.”

Len rolled his eyes. “You’re a space heater. You’ll survive,” he said without sympathy and grabbed his hand. Mick startled at the touch, cheeks pink from what must have been the cold, and Len tugged him a little closer to the ice. “One hour and you’ll manage to shut her up.”

“Pretty sure you’re the one harping on it,” Mick grumbled, but he let himself be dragged closer. “I’m gonna fall on my ass.”

“Trust me.”

“I do,” Mick said with a force that was too serious for where they were. They both froze, wide eyes staring at each other until Len cleared his throat and looked away. Lisa was working on a spin in his peripheral, graceful and practiced, and he let himself smile through the sudden awkwardness.

“Just…don’t let me fall, alright?” Mick sighed, giving Len’s hand a nervous little squeeze that pulled his focus back.

“Okay,” he said instead of telling Mick that he’d probably fall anyway. People always fell on their first time—most of the times, really—and he was no teacher. Lisa had gotten obsessed with the sport while watching TV one year and he’d had to teach her on worn-out skates he’d actually _bought_ at a yard sale. They’d both ended up with bruises. Somehow, he didn’t think teaching Mick would be any easier.

Mick stepped out onto the ice with shaking legs and reached for Len’s other hand in a panic. “Who the fuck thinks this is fun?” he grumbled. “We’re on Candid Camera, aren’t we? This is why you’re making me do this.”

“Yes, I asked them to do a special about farm boys learning to skate,” Len said dryly.

“Fuck you.”

“Don’t be so cold, Mick,” he said and grinned when the other boy glared. “We’re going to have an _ice_ time.”

“I hate you so much.”

“You like me,” Len said and noticed the cold was really starting to color Mick’s cheeks. “And stop looking at your feet. That’s how you’re going to-”

Mick leaned too far forward before Len could finish and remind him that the rental hockey skates didn’t have the toe-picks Lisa’s figure skates had. Rounded blades tipped him forward and Len was still a growth spurt behind. They went down in a pile of limbs and pained grunts as Mick landed on top of him. Len’s tailbone ached in time with his head and he could hear Mick grumbling about his knee.

“Falling for me now, Mick?” he asked and hoped Mick thought his voice cracked because he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

Mick lifted his head, nose bumping against Len’s cheek, and his cheeks red in ways that Len almost suspected weren’t from the cold. “Throwing myself at you,” he replied with a half-hearted chuckle. They definitely should have been gathering themselves and getting back to their feet, because people were staring, but Mick’s eyes softened and Len’s breath caught in his throat. “Lenny-”

Ice sprayed beside them as someone skidded to a stop. “Are you two gonna kiss?”

Their faces flushed and they stumbled back to their feet with hands that clung to each other for balance. They didn’t kiss.

Mick didn’t let go of his hand until they were off the ice and back in their street shoes, but they kept stealing glances and their cheeks stayed pink. Mick dragged him back into the narrow path behind the bleachers while Lisa ran to the bathroom.

They _did_ kiss then, some mix of hormones and danger of being seen and _why have we waited so long to do this_ that made Len’s toes curl in his boots.

Lisa caught them and giggled the whole way home.


	10. Beach Vacations [Captain Canary] - Rated K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: The team gets a time off and everybody wants to go to the beach except Sara and Leonard, Leonard obviously says that it is because it's too hot and he doesn't do hot and Sara says she just doesn't like it, but Leonard thinks there's something bothering her, when they are forced to step out of the Waverider, Leonard noticed that Sara always keeps a distance with the sea and asks her about it, and he realized she is afraid of the ocean because of almost dying twice in it. Hurt Comfort Captain Canary

Len watched them, had been watching them since the Oculus blew and he was supposed to die. Watching and floating, he watched them fix the timeline they’d broke. Aberrations fixed. Timelines put back on course. He felt a stab of sympathy for Ray and the returned fiancé that he had to lose all over again. Watched Jax sit with him and break out beers the professor wouldn’t have approved of. They toasted to loved ones and the ones they’d lost.

It seemed almost poetic that the time stream chose then to spit him out.

He endured the hugs—barely—and made horrible puns to cover up the overly emotional welcome homes. He fully met the new teammates and passed silent judgements that ultimately ended in _they’re okay for now_. Rash judgements wouldn’t be good, he told himself, not when his mind was still a messy swirl of timelines and a left hand that wouldn’t quite stop shaking.

“Your eyes are blue,” Sara told him later, leaning against the doorway of the room Nate had vacated to give him some space. He frowned at her and she waved him off. “Bluer,” she corrected.

There was a witty line on the tip of his tongue, one about her remembering after all this time, but he’d seen the past version of him sweep through their lives. It left a sour taste in his mouth, so he kept it shut.

Better to stay silent than admit he didn’t think he’d fully left the Oculus behind.

 

 

They woke up the next morning to Mick parking them in Aruba with gruff explanations that they needed a break. The break part was true, but the assumption the others made that it was a celebration of Leonard’s homecoming wasn’t. Mick wanted a beach and cold beers. If he parked on the beach for Len, it was in revenge for dying, because his partner knew he hated the beach. The heat burned skin that he’d always said was too fair and the feeling of sand against his feet always made him twitchy.

He hung back by the boardwalk with Sara as the others rushed to the water. Happy squeals and splashing he wanted no part in, but he had figured Sara would be with them. Instead, she was six inches to his left, hands curled over the metal railing so hard he could see her knuckles going white. It matched the pallor her face had taken on, wide eyes staring out at the water with…

Fear, he realized. She was scared.

He’d seen the stories when the Gambit went down, that Sara had supposedly died along with Queen and his brat kid, but she hadn’t died. She’d survived the ship sinking. He couldn’t fault her for being wary of it now. He still shuddered any time he heard glass break at a bar.

“You don’t need to go in the water,” he told her as he watched Amaya dive through a crashing wave.

“You don’t have to stay up here,” she countered, but she looked at him. He could feel her eyes on him.

“I don’t like beaches,” was an easier answer than explaining the way bad textures sent him off into a jittery mess. She seemed to accept it, though, because she nodded and turned her back to the shore. She was wringing her hands when he glanced over.

“What do you call a vacation, then?”

“Prison,” he replied quickly before he moved to an honest, “I like cards.”

“You like _counting_ cards. You weren’t fooling me before,” she accused before she shot him a smile. “Rematch?”

They were still playing cards on the floor of the Waverider when the others finally piled back in.


	11. He’s Ain’t Heavy [Rogue Canary] – Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Rogue Canary: Mick gets knocked out and Len + Sara have to somehow carry him (which we all know is usually Mick's job lol). Bonus points for Lisa finding it hilarious.

The thing was, they were good with bar fights. Sara could practically bruise someone without lifting a finger and Mick looked at them like a five-year-old looked at presents on Christmas morning.

Len used to be better at them. He’d never reveled in them in the same way his partners did, but he knew how to lay someone out. But that was before the Oculus blew him to pieces and put him back together a little broken. His left arm was virtually useless, as temperamental and finicky as Mick after he’d gone too long without a flame. It worked when it wanted to—but never with the strength it had once—and went utterly numb when it didn’t.

It had been one of the bad days. Someone at the bar in Saints & Sinners made a crack about his eyes—they glowed too blue now, especially the one on the left—and they’d caught them when Mick and Sara were already itching were some kind of fight. He didn’t see who threw the first punch, but he dove into it with one good arm and one numb one that he couldn’t fully close into a fist.

Mick went down after one good hard hit against the bar and Sara finished off the last couple as Len contemplated reaching for his gun.

Then, it was over and people turned back to their conversations like it hadn’t happened at all.

Sara looked around, perplexed. “This happen a lot?”

“The fights or them involving Mick?” he checked as he knelt down next to the arsonist.

“Either,” she muttered, but she shrugged it off like she hadn’t expected a real answer out of him. She knelt on Mick’s other side instead. “Probably about time to head back to the ship.”

It was. They were supposed to set off in the morning, but the Waverider was clear on the other side of the city and Len knew Mick well enough to know he was down for the count. He sighed. “There’s a safe house that’s closer.”

Her eyebrows inched up, surprised, like she understood the opening he was offering. She’d slid into his and Mick’s dynamic—because both of them were too emotionally stunted to actually use the word relationship—easily after the time stream had dropped him back into their laps. In some areas, though, she was still an outsider, too new to understand the depth of him and Mick that was born out of thirty years together. They’d bowed out on a visit with Lisa rather than deal with questions none of them could really answer.

But letting her into a safe house was a step. As rundown as most of them were, they were havens that even most of the Rogues were still clueless about. Lisa didn’t even know all of them. To let Sara in was a step towards something.

She nodded rather than call him out on it, but he saw the smile curling up one side of her mouth. “You gonna help me carry him?”

He didn’t think he could, actually. The hand that had been mostly-numb before had shifted over to definitely-numb and he was pretty sure he couldn’t wrap clumsy fingers around a pen, let alone keep a grip on Mick’s bulk. He still grunted out an affirmative, though, because Mick had always said he was a stubborn pain in the ass.

He dropped Mick before they’d made it off their knees.

“Your hand?” she asked and hummed when he nodded. “I’ve got him. How far’s the safe house?”

“About twenty minutes,” he said after he took a moment to calculate driving versus walking. They had a car—stolen—that was getting abandoned in the parking lot, but none of them were getting behind the wheel when they were drunk. They were criminals—and an assassin—but they weren’t stupid.

“Okay. I’ve carried him before, anyway,” she said and grimaced a second later, because they both knew the last time she’d done it, she was carrying him away so Len could die in Mick’s place. Goodbye kisses and broken promises and lives that should have ended with better last words than a quote from Pinocchio.

They didn’t mention it. Sara hefted Mick up instead and Len used his good hand to steady their unconscious third as they walked.

Sara gave a relieved sigh when they made it to the warehouse.

Mick woke up almost immediately after that.

Len laughed.

Sara glared. “Next time, I’m kicking him awake first.”

Mick frowned at her as he sat back up, mouth open like he was going to ask what he’d missed. Paused. “Are we at the safe house?” He looked at Len. “We brought her to a safe house?”

Len nodded.

Mick frowned. “Can we fit three on this bed?”

“I will make you a human mattress if I have to,” Sara told him and stripped down to her tank top and underwear. “Shove over.”

“Len?”

Two pairs of eyes stared at him as he hesitated, because close quarters and too many hands would always make him nervous. He nodded anyway and slid under the musty comforter with them.

He fell asleep to Mick’s snoring and Sara absently rubbing circles into his palm.


	12. When Sara Met Lisa [Captain Canary] – Rated K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flabbergabst prompt: Captain Canary + Leonard introducing Sara to Lisa, vice versa.

The thing was that Lisa had never actually had the official meet-and-greet with people he dated. Granted, that was probably more due to the fact that Len didn’t date than anything. Most of his experience—excluding one disastrous boyfriend when he was nineteen that Lisa was better off not knowing about—was in one night stands with intriguing strangers when the mood struck him.

Sara had been unexpected, a connection he hadn’t planned on when he joined the Waverider. There was a darkness in her that matched the broken parts in him. Comradery. Amusement. Card games. He cared about exactly two people—Lisa and Mick—but she’d snuck into a third spot that hadn’t existed before Rip Hunter had gathered them on a rooftop.

They hadn’t had time to explore it before the Oculus, before Time Masters and failsafes and death pulled them apart. It blew him into the time stream and her into a captain’s position he didn’t think she’d been as ready for as she thought she was. Friendships suffered and teams fractured as he watched them, an unwilling bystander as time broke and things fell apart even worse.

They saved him by accident, but corporeal was better than the hallucination Mick had thought he was. He and Sara came back together after that, dancing around like they used to until they picked up a batch of moonshine that took the hesitation right out of them.

Lisa wouldn’t have even known if Mick hadn’t told her.

“You died,” Mick told him with a grin that was too cheeky. “Call it payback.”

“You can’t use that excuse forever, Mick,” he told him in an annoyed drawl, but it didn’t change the fact that Lisa was texting him the second they landed in Central.

“I’m not taking you home to my dad,” she told him when she parked in front of Saints & Sinners. “He’s already had one heart attack. I don’t think he’s ready to know I’m dating you.”

“Mick’s probably already told Felicity,” he reminded her, because that friendship had probably been one of the oddest things to come out of the others fighting aliens. _Aliens_ and Mick making friends with Felicity Smoak was the weird thing. He almost ached for the days before metahumans when life was a little more simple. Almost.

“Which means he probably already knows,” she sighed, but there was a fond smile on her face. “How about I make him promise to leave the cuffs at home?”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“Okay, so he wouldn’t.” She shook her head. “Lisa first. She left that gold gun of hers behind, right?”

“She said she did.” Which probably meant it was strapped to her thigh, because he’d taught her too well.

He saw the familiar gun exactly where he’d expected it to be when they walked in. Sara muttered something about their family under her breath that he didn’t pay much attention to. “Lisa.”

She hopped off the stool and into his arms in a second. “You just couldn’t settle for themed-supervillain, could you? You had to go and try to add some kind of Doctor Who crap onto your resume?”

“It was that or speedster. Central has enough already,” he deadpanned. He gestured to his side. “Sara, Trainwreck. Trainwreck, Lisa.”

“Jerk,” Lisa shot back before she gave Sara an appraising look. “Robbing the cradle, Lenny?”

“ _Lisa_.”

“Hey, she’s cute. I’m older than your girlfriend, but she’s cute.”

“I thought you told her I was an assassin,” Sara checked, picking at a nail nervously.

“Oh, he did. Big, scary assassin.” Lisa waved her off. “I’ve seen worse.”

Sara’s shoulders sagged, relieved, and the ice was broken. Len watched them like an outsider after that, drawn in only when someone directed a comment towards him or when Lisa started pulling out every trick she’d ever learned from Mick. On one hand, he was relieved it was doing alright. On the other, he was a little concerned about the idea of them getting along too well.

“You’re lucky, Lenny,” Lisa told him at the end of the night when he slid a stolen credit card over to pay their tab. “If you weren’t dating her, I probably would have tried to sleep with her.”

He was going to kill her.


	13. Band AU [Coldwave] – Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: DCTV band/music AU Coldwave.

Len had been prepared for life as a criminal. A stint in juvie under his belt and fingers that twitched unless he was picking a lock. It had felt like the obvious career path, a future he’d been trained for before he was old enough to fully understand the weight of it all. And he’d had a partner—or hopes of one—sitting in the wings for whenever they seemed to fall back together. He’d known Mick in juvie, _liked_ Mick and the wildness in his style. Unpredictable and risky, but his gut said it was worth it.

They met up when they were barely eighteen, though, and the job went bad. It had nothing to do with Mick and everything to do with security systems getting upgraded without him realizing, but it was enough to break the nervous trust of a partnership they hadn’t really cultivated yet.

He ended up in prison—actual fucking _prison_ —a year later when his father left him to take the fall again. Prison shrinks and therapy sessions he mostly smart-assed his way through, but she shoved him into a music therapy course as a way to calm his nervous hands.

He took to the guitar like a fish to water.

The music teacher said he had an ear for it, that there was a real talent there.

“Because there’s a future in music?” he drawled, sarcastic.

To his credit, Grant didn’t rise to the bait. He just raised an eyebrow. “Is there a future in being a criminal?” he countered. “Maybe you won’t hit the Grammys, but it’s not going to put you in prison. Or an early grave.”

He told himself he’d lose the guitar the second he was outside prison walls.

He didn’t.

 

 

He spent his first two years on the outside playing at dive bars. The money wasn’t great, but it was mostly honest. With Lewis in prison again and a flawed system handing Lisa off to a goddamn felon instead of a stable foster home, playing in bars after she’d gone to bed seemed like a better tradeoff.

He was playing at a bar on the border between Keystone and Central when Mick walked in, head shaved and burn scars licking up his arms, but Len recognized him in a blink.

“Music, huh?” Mick said in lieu of a greeting when he sidled up next to Len at the bar later.

“Shaved head, huh?”

Mick glared, but he bought him a beer anyway. “Music therapy?” he asked and gestured at Len’s hands when Len met his gaze with wide eyes. “You used to twitch a lot. My shrink shoved me in it too.”

“You play?”

“Drums,” he specified. “I’m not that good.”

(He was. Mick played with the kind of intensity Len thought he only reserved for fire.)

 

 

Mick joined him one night, a steady accompaniment to his guitar. Then, another and another and another.

Eventually, bars started booking them instead of just booking him.

Lisa said they needed a band name.

Mick hit him with a pillow when he suggested Coldwave.

They settled for The Rogues and let Lisa provide vocals when she was old enough to get into the bars.

 

 

They never made it big, but there was a YouTube following and joking suggestions about America’s Got Talent. Len said they’d steal the show. Mick threatened to strangle him.

“You’d strangle your husband?” he asked, a fake innocent look on his face as he flashed the wedding band. The ring—thick and gaudy thing that it was—glinted, a memento from a career and a lifetime ago.

“Keep up with the puns and I might.”

Their next album was comprised of a track list of the worst puns Len could think of. It was worth Mick trying to smother him.


	14. The Married Game [Coldwave] – Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Godaof221b prompt: Coldwave - "No one ever seemed to believe that they were married- of course, they couldn't believe it some days either."

They got married in a Boston courthouse two months after gay marriage passed in 2004. They did it with emotionally-constipated huffs that it was better that way, that spousal privilege meant they couldn’t testify against each other and wouldn’t that piss off the cops, but the rings were from their first job. The significance and Len’s awkward sentimentality was there.

They said their vows with the kind of seriousness they used when they were planning heists.

Mick huffed that it was about time Len was an honest man _somewhere_.

Len said Mick stole his heart and grinned when his partner—his husband, now—groaned.

 

 

Things didn’t really change after that. Lisa insisted it was because they’d practically been married since they were fourteen, that rings on fingers—or chains when they couldn’t wear them normally—wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t as if the cops believed them, anyway.

“We’re married,” he told Officer West in a low drawl while his partner sputtered. “Boston.”

“Mazel tov,” West said. He didn’t sound all that congratulatory, but there wasn’t any disgust in there, just the usual amount of disdain. “But we both know Missouri doesn’t recognize it.”

A flaw to his plan, but one he’d known about going in. Still, he grinned at West and held out his wrists. “Honor among _alleged_ thieves. You’ll just have to lock us up, because I’m not testifying.”

They did; Mick for arson and Len for contempt—that was half-refusal to testify and half-spectacularly pissing off an elderly white judge about gay rights.

Lisa broke them out within a week.

Len paid a kid to mail West a postcard from Aruba a week after they’d already set off for the Maldives.

It was the only time he liked the beach.

 

 

Shreveport. Fire. _Mick_.

Len left with a heavy heart and their rings—his whole and Mick’s cut—in a box. The thought of divorce crossed his mind while Lisa hovered and tried to convince him to go back. He didn’t go back, couldn’t even fathom the idea of cutting that last tie.

It didn’t matter, anyway. No one had ever believed they were married when they had the piece of paper to prove it.

 

 

Central. Speedsters. Guns that were as much jokes as they were apologies. Mick came back and Len stayed and they were…something. The rings stayed in boxes, like seeing Mick’s cut one would bring everything rushing back to the surface.

They didn’t talk about fires or the anxiety that rose up in Len’s chest now when Mick stared at the flame a hair too long.

They didn’t talk about marriage, but Mick called Len his partner in that same gravelly tone that spoke of double meanings and unvoiced _I love you_ ’s. Len returned it.

Lisa groaned and said she hated them both.

 

 

The Waverider came, a childhood dream come to life, and that should have been enough to tell Len he needed to stay away. Childhood dreams had always ended in nightmares and abandoning Mick in the woods was worse.

“I took care of it,” he told them when he came back, jaw clenched tight and eyes staring at a blank spot on the wall.

“He was your friend,” Jax accused, shocked and horrified. He hadn’t expected Len to do it—to kill Mick, the way they all thought he had. Len didn’t correct them.

“He was my partner,” he said instead and pretended his voice didn’t break at the end. Partner. Husband, even if they hadn’t used the word much since they got back together. It all meant the same thing in the end, because he was on the ship and Mick was alone in the woods.

He’d go back, he told himself later when he’d slipped into Mick’s room instead of his own. He’d give him a little time to cool off and have Rip swing back around. It was a timeship, he reminded himself for the thousandth time, they wouldn’t be late.

 

 

They were too late. Kronos wasn’t the man he married in Boston. The Mick that was left behind afterwards didn’t feel the same either.

No one ever believed they were married. Len thought he was starting to agree.

That didn’t stop him from slamming his gun into the side of Mick’s head so he could take his place.

Whatever Mick there was in the wake of the Time Masters, he hoped he forgave Len for making him a widower.

 

 

They didn’t talk about the three months after the time stream spit him out. The screaming and the ramblings that were either crazed or prophecies. Mick sliding a resized ring back on the proper finger so Len could twist it anxiously. A repaired ring on Mick’s own hand.

When insanity gave way to reality, Len held onto it with shaking hands. The others knew, he realized slowly, familiar and unfamiliar sets of eyes staring pointedly at rings and determinedly not asking about it, but he saw the disbelief.

“You told them?” he asked Mick when Gideon had finally released him from the med bay and Mick had led him back to their room. Not just Mick’s room, he reminded himself. His old one was currently housing a historian that stared at him like he was about to grow horns. As if resurrection was the strangest thing any of them had seen.

“Didn’t have to,” Mick grunted, but his ring finger twitched like its shiny companion was all the telling that had to be done. “Careful with Amaya,” he added. “She’d not bad, but she’s still getting used to modern shit.”

Len hummed, still twisting the ring around in what had definitely become a nervous habit. Or any habit. He never really stopped doing it.

“You okay?”

Yes. He was alive. No. He still couldn’t sleep. Maybe. He could tell up from down, but the ship made his skin crawl. “I don’t know,” he settled for instead.

He kept twisting the ring.


	15. Pregnancy Cravings [Captain Canary] – Rated K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dirty-half-dozen prompt: Captain Canary: very pregnant Mrs. Snart wants Cinnabon in the middle of the night.

He woke up to a gentle shove and a whispered _Leonard_.

“No,” he groaned, face in the pillow, but the gentle shove came a little harder. He lifted his head with a tired glare. “No.”

Sara stared back at him, irritatingly amused, because she knew exactly what he was saying no to and she didn’t care. She laid a hand on her rounded belly like it was a reminder and raised her eyebrow. “You realize I was an assassin, right?”

“So go kill the people at Wendy’s and get your own bacon burger,” he muttered at her. “I can only hold that place up so many times.”

“You could _pay for it_ ,” she huffed, but there was a hint of laughter in her tone. He was pretty sure she sent money to the casualties of her cravings in apology. “Besides, I don’t want Wendy’s.”

“I’m not going to Taco Bell.” Less because he’d held it up so many times and more because of that one time he’d set a truck-full of chihuahuas loose in the store. There had been more alcohol involved than he liked to admit and Lisa definitely still had the video evidence.

She poked him this time, nail digging into his arm through the thin material of his shirt. “I don’t want Taco Bell,” she groused. “I want Cinnabon.”

“The Waverider’s gone and all the stores are closed,” he reminded her and dropped his head back onto the pillow.

The familiar weight of his phone dropping onto his back made him groan.

“Mick,” she said cheerfully, because they both damn well knew Mick would fire up a Cinnabon kitchen on his own before he let either one of them eat stale ones. Sara was pregnant and Len barely ate like an adult as it was.

“He’s not making you cinnamon rolls,” he told her and turned onto his side so his phone slid off his back. “He’s on vacation.”

“From _time travelling_ ,” she corrected. “Not cooking. He made us dinner two days ago.”

“Because Lisa told him all we’d eaten for a week was Big Belly Burger,” he pointed out, but he rolled over so he could get the phone and shoot her another tired glare. “How long until the baby is born?”

“Two more weeks,” she answered and they both pretended he didn’t stiffen up. As much of a surprise as the kid was, the idea of fatherhood still dredged up a lot of fears Len had shut away years ago. Sara knew he’d never expected kids—never wanted them, honestly—but there was one on the way and it didn’t care about his hangups.

“If Mick gets mad, I’m blaming you,” he warned her, because thirty years of friendship didn’t save him from the wrath of waking Mick at two in the morning.

“Blame me and I tell my dad you stole my wedding ring,” she countered and leaned over to kiss him quickly before she pushed herself out of bed and disappeared towards the bathroom.

He still blamed her when Mick picked up the phone.


	16. Labor & Delivery [Captain Canary] – Rated K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Labor and delivery - Captain Canary

Sara went into labor while Len was elbow deep in a safety deposit box, because of course she did.

It wasn’t like she’d told him to not go on the job. She’d watched him and Mick pour over plans for weeks, discussing timing and plans for when the diamonds would be delivered. She’d even pointed out a bit of faulty timing on Len’s part, because he wasn’t accounting for the way his left hand tended to descend into sudden spasms these days.

She damn well knew what he was and she’d accepted it when she accepted him, his baggage, and the ring he’d stolen from a jewelry store in 1964.

Which was why she damn well knew that going into labor when he was on a job was a horrible idea.

In hindsight, he should have accounted for the idea that their kid—genetically destined to be a damn pain in the ass—wouldn’t give a shit.

“Should we ditch?” Mick asked. The alarms were still silent as ever. They could close everything back up and slip out.

Len raised an eyebrow in response.

Mick rolled his eyes. “You’re the one that gets to explain to Blondie why you missed your kid being born,” he warned him, but he went to his side of the safe and picked the lock on another box.

“Kids take forever,” he returned and tipped a tray of diamonds into his bag. “She knows what she married.”

“Doesn’t her dad still want to lock you up?”

Len shrugged, pretty sure that was a knee-jerk reaction anyone would have when they found out their kid was with him. He was pretty sure Quentin Lance was more or less used to him these days, anyway. “Three minutes, sixteen seconds.”

 

 

He left Mick with the diamonds and instructions to lay low until they could meet with their fence, got on his bike, and left Opal City for Central.

He may have broken every traffic law and Mick and Sara both would kill him for how fast he’d been going, but he made it to the hospital before the baby crowned. Sara was red-faced and sweating when he slipped into the room and her grip on his good hand was probably going to cause permanent nerve damage. He let her do it anyway.

“You’re late,” she hissed at him and groaned when another contraction hit.

“This baby clearly doesn’t have my timing,” he shot back.

“I could kill you.”

“Doesn’t seem to stick,” he reminded her as nurses shot them odd—and vaguely concerned—looks.

The glare she shot at him spoke of pain and at least a week on the couch.

 

 

For all the bone grinding and the death threats—“Love you too, Sara.”—the birth itself was pretty quiet. A groan and a few pushes and the doctor was announcing they had a son. Sara smiled while nerves coiled in Len’s stomach, not sure if he was relieved it wasn’t a girl or terrified that it was a boy.

Honestly, he still wasn’t sure he didn’t want to run for the hills, but Sara smiled at the baby on her chest like none of her demons mattered right then. Len wondered if he’d ever feel the same, like that little person could make him forget every fear that had haunted him since Sara gave him a panicked look and said she was pregnant.

He wondered if actually having the kid—instead of the future mess of nerves it had been before—would just make every fear a little worse and a little more real.

Sara didn’t seem to care as she put the baby in his arms. She didn’t say he looked like Len or that he looked like her, which was good, because Len would have pointed out that he still looked too squished to look like anyone. Neither of them were quite that sentimental, though, so he relished in her silence as the baby squirmed in his arms.

Fears were still there—a little louder now—but protectiveness washed over him and he found himself smiling.

“You okay?”

He pulled in a breath, held it, and nodded on the exhale.


	17. Panic Attack [Captain Canary] Rated - K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> all-the-fandom-love-11 prompt: Sara has an extreme panic attack when they experience a time storm on the Waverider because it feels like the Gambit going down and Leonard comforts and helps calm her down.

The time storm had him on edge. It wasn’t the worst they’d encountered, but it was enough that the ship had been rocking for hours now. Mick was piloting them through it with grunts and annoyed reminders that, thanks, but he’d had his _own_ ship before. He was probably the only one that could get them through the storm without them crash landing fuck knows when.

They’d all split up, drifting back to labs and to private quarters.

Len had sat in his own room for a while, hands curled around the edge of a table as he tried to call up some of the Oculus energy Gideon had said was still floating through him. Just a little left, he thought when his eyes only glowed a faint blue in the mirror. It was almost gone. Good.

The ship gave a harder jerk that almost sent him to the ground and he raised his eyes towards the ceiling in annoyance. Wondered if the time stream was just pissed off about the new anachronisms or if it was pissed that he’d finally found his way out of his prison.

He snorted and left, winding back through the halls until he’d made it to Sara’s. He didn’t knock. “Do you have my cards? I can’t find-”

Sara was huddled back in the corner of her bed, eyes half-lidded and breath coming fast. Panic attack, he realized. He’d had enough of them over his own life—thanks, Dad—to recognize one.

He didn’t ask what was wrong. He moved towards the bed, moves telegraphed so her panicked eyes could track him, and set himself on the bed. Close enough to touch, if she wanted to, but not sure if he wanted her to reach out. He’d been even worse about handling touch since he’d broken free of the time stream.

Shit, he was the worst person to be there as comfort, but he wasn’t a big enough dick to leave her either.

His old cards were on the shelf next to her bed, though. He’d figured she’d stolen them when he couldn’t find them in the boxes of stuff Mick had packed up, but there had been missions and Gideon fixing the arm the Oculus had more or less blown off. This was the first time he’d really even thought about them.

He grabbed them off the shelf as she watched and just…started dealing. Not a game, he realized halfway through. An old card trick that a guy in prison had taught him. Magic tricks and cons.

“Pick a card,” he said, overdramatic and his Central City accent just a little thicker than normal.

She glared at him.

“Fine, I’ll pick it,” he said and drew one blindly from the cut piles. He dangled it in front of her face and tossed it back into the mix. “Gonna be a lot less impressive now.”

She looked at him like he’d lost his mind.

He wasn’t too sure she was wrong.

“Is _this_ your card?” he asked when he flipped over the six of diamonds.

“No,” she gasped out, but it was a word, so he’d take it.

“I never said I was good at these.” He gathered the cards back up, shuffled, drew two cards off the top, and fished for a queen. He laid them out in a line between them. “Find the queen,” he told her before he started moving. His hands weren’t as fast as they used to be—both regenerated as they were—but they worked well enough.

She found the queen the first time, but missed on the second.

And the third.

By the fifth time she’d missed it, she finally realized he’d slid the damn queen up his sleeve and had traded it out with a joker.

“You’re an ass,” she said later, glaring without the heat. Or the panic, he noticed. Her eyes were still a little wild, but her breath had calmed as the panic attack seemed to taper off.

“Yeah, yeah. Wanna play poker?”


	18. First Meeting AU [Coldwave] - Rated K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Coldwave - alternative first meeting

For years, it was his grandfather that had done the upkeep on the house. The walls ate the meager income the ice cream truck gave him, but he tried. It was the house he’d bought with his wife. The house they’d raised their son in. The house their son had brought his new wife to. The house his grandson was born in.

But then, Lewis left, shuffled away to prison and the house wasn’t the same. Leonard walked the halls of it, trailing after his grandfather and watching the world pass. He watched from the kitchen’s doorway when little Lisa was brought home from the hospital, wrapped in pink. He watched her grow, guiding her as she toddled around. He whispered to her when she rubbed sore ears and pretended that her new gold studs didn’t hurt.

He watched from the front porch when she left, a car full of boxes and her ice skates. “Bye, Lis,” he murmured after her and gave a short wave as she gave one last look towards her home.

The house grew quiet after that, emptied out after Lisa and her mother moved back east. It left Len alone, staring at the bare bones of a house that had been his family’s for so long. The one that had seen his first breath.

“The history,” a woman said cautiously as her fingers traced the painted-over grooves of his old growth chart on the kitchen door’s frame, “I read the stories…”

“It was nearly twenty years ago, Sarah.” The man pulled her against his chest. “It’s fine. It’s Central. You know how much they like their old stories. Besides, Mick and Becca already claimed their bedrooms.”

She sighed. “I know,” she said, but she opened her mouth to say something else. Another argument, maybe, or another regret about the farm they’d left behind in Keystone.

“Mom, where’s the box with my-”

The boy—Len’s age, he thought, no older than seventeen—stopped mid-sentence, frozen where he stood. Wide eyes stared as Len moved around his parents.

“Mick, what is it?” his mother asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Hi,” Len said, more a test than anything. Just to verify.  _Always verify_ , his father had told him once upon a time. Ironic, he thought, because the man had never planned ahead. “I’m Len.”

The boy kept staring at him. “Uh… Mom, those stories the realtor had mentioned?”

His father sighed, long-suffering. “Not you too. Mick, you used to sleep out in that old barn. Don’t tell me you’re scared of an old ghost story.”

“But I…” Mick trailed off, pausing before he gave a long breath. “I just…thought I saw something.”

“You did,” Len told him with a grin. “You know, you picked my room.”

“Shit,” Mick breathed. His parents scolded him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

Because the stories were right; the old stories the neighbors told about Lewis Snart and how he’d killed his wife and son in ’72. Len’s mom had passed on, finally free of the man she’d stopped loving and grown to fear, but Len… Len had always been too scared. He’d stuck around, giving his grandfather company until he died and, then, trailing after Lisa when the next owners brought her home.

Len had been born in the house.

But he’d also died in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is 100% nirejseki's fault. Her and her damn deadfic. If you haven't read it yet, read it.


	19. Teen!Last Refuge AU [Captain Canary] – Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Instead of picking up baby!Len, the legends get teen!Len or 20-something!Len. I just want one of them to flirt with one of the Saras, you can choose what to do besides that. Thanks

They grabbed him from Jitters’ roof.

“I wasn’t going to jump,” he’d snapped at them, arms crossed over a skinny torso. Please. If he was going to kill himself, he’d at least stage it as a murder so he could get his dad locked up.

He just liked it up there. It was quiet and he always stole enough coffee before he left to make sure that he didn’t need to sleep.

Which was fine, considering he’d been kidnapped by time travelers—one of which he thought was himself—and dropped off at Cult Kindergarten.

What kind of people was he associating with in the future? He’d have to talk to Mick about this. Older Mick. Not the teenage one that had just killed his family and had finally— _finally_ —fallen asleep with his head in Len’s lap. The touching wasn’t his favorite, but exceptions could be made. It was Mick and he’d kind of roofied him in an attempt to make him _rest_.

“You two are close,” the blonde girl said, Marty on her hip while Jax slept in the bassinette behind her. Sara, he thought her name was. Maybe. He hadn’t really been listening past understanding that Mick’s family was dead and, look, they apparently kidnapped babies too.

“He’s always wanted to have his face in my lap,” he drawled, the same as he used to do when there hadn’t been a good prison fight in a while.

“Are you two…”

“No.” They were still a package deal, though. Had been since they were fourteen. “That crush your threesome dreams?”

She didn’t even look shocked at the suggestion. “Heartbroken,” she said, sarcastic, and put Marty back in his bassinette.

“What year are you from, anyway?”

“2007.”

“Are cars flying yet?”

She stared at him. “We’ve been kidnapped by time travelers because some bad guys want to kill us and dropped in some weird boarding school. And you’re asking about flying cars.” The tone made it sound like she was questioning his sanity.

“Priorities,” he said and waved her off. “I already figured out the layout and I’ve seen better security at toy stores. They’ve got a spare ship in the back. Nine minutes and…” He tilted his head, thinking. “…sixteen seconds and I’m outta here.”

“Like you’d know how to fly one of those things.”

“I _have_ seen Star Wars.”

“Those are space ships,” she countered. “Not the same.”

“Close enough.”

She rolled her eyes and dropped down to sit next to him. “Can I come?”

“I’ve already for a first mate,” he told her, “but I could use a wench.”

She punched him in the arm. He gritted his teeth as she knocked a healing bruise. “Those are _pirates_.”

“Time pirate?”

“Time wench?” she shot back, but the grin seemed more amused than mad.

He could work with that. “Wanna break out of here?”

They made it out of there in nine minutes, sixteen seconds. On the _dot_. And that included the time it took to wake Mick and tell him they were making a prison break.

Sometimes, he impressed himself.

It also impressed Sara if the look she gave him said anything. Or the kiss.


	20. Post-S2 AU [Gen, light Rogue Canary] - Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous said: When the Legends take Dhark back to his time, so it's only Leonard in the brig when they crash in DinoLA. So now they have to figure out how to fix time with Legion!Len still on the ship. Thanks ♡

Dhark was gone. That was good, at least. The man had smothered him, magic covering him up like a heavy blanket he couldn’t shove off. He’d hated it. Hated Dhark. Hated this whole damn thing, because it hadn’t gone to plan. The entire plan had fallen apart with Mick’s band of heroes winning and Mick  _not on his side_.

Something in him snorted, bitter and angry, and he leaned back against the wall of his cell as the ship—an honest to God  _time ship_ —shook and… Yes, that was definitely a crash landing.

His head was killing him.

They left him there for a while, horrible captors that they were. He could have been dead. He could have been starving. That crash landing could have injured him. He’d give them hell for it later just to watch the bleeding hearts of the team flounder. He was fine except for the headache, but he’d had that headache since the Legion of Doom—who  _named them_ —had taken him from Central and Dhark’s magic had washed over him.

Mick and the blonde were the ones that came back eventually, a little battered and muttering to each other about dinosaurs. Which he was going to ask about. Later. He had complaining to do, thank you. He wasn’t going to get distracted by-

“Did you say T-Rex?” Damn it.

“I thought you liked pterodactyls,” Mick said, an eyebrow quirked up in amusement.

“There was one?”

“She flew one,” Mick told him and jerked a thumb towards the blonde. Sara. Sara Lance. The one Dhark had wanted to kill, because she was trying to kill him. Because he killed her sister. Because she kept trying to kill him. Fuck, his head.

“Impressive,” he drawled, which for him and his shitty attempts at acting like a normal human—as Mick called it—usually meant that she’d just gotten about three times hotter. He propped one elbow on his knee while his fingers massaged his temple. “But not right now, honey, I have a headache.”

They both rolled their eyes.

“Shoot,” she said dryly. “Right when I wanted to try out the dark side.”

“We have cookies.”

“He burns water,” Mick told her. “And he thinks Kraft is real mac and cheese.”

“Only the shapes,” Len muttered.

“You’re six,” Mick shot back.

“I think I’m a little brainwashed,” he corrected, half a confession. “Or the extra voice in my head is me finally having that psychotic break Dr. Lu always said I was gonna have.”

Things got serious. Med bays. Scans. The AI was appropriately sassy and Len decided he liked her. It? It sounded like a her.

“They brainwashed him,” Sara said, horrified, as Mick seemed to lock up. Fists curled and, yes, that was Mick’s burn-them-all-to-ashes look. He hadn’t seen that look in a while.

“Is that why Other Me in my head is so pissed?” he asked as he reclined in the odd chair. “I forgot I knew how to swear in Hebrew.”

“Dhark’s gone,” Sara said. “Shouldn’t that have broken it?”

“It’s magic,” Mick reminded her, voice gruff and angry. “No one said that shit’s got a range.”

“There is always cognitive recalibration,” the AI suggested.

Mick glared at the ceiling.

“More brainwashing?” Len guessed.

“That only worked with me because it was the Time Masters,” Mick snapped, “and I wasn’t the whole way under.”

Note to self: Mick had been brainwashed by Time Masters.

Note to self: Kill all Time Masters.

“It doesn’t sound like they did that great a job,” Sara pointed out. “He’s hearing…himself?” Len nodded in confirmation. “So the recalibration could work. Get the rest of the magic out?”

“Sounds like a lot of questions,” Mick muttered.

“Do I look like I went to Hogwarts?”

Len would have had a thousand comments if school girls were his thing. They weren’t.

“How do you recalibrate him, anyway?”

Mick answered her by punching him. Very hard. In the head.

 

 

He woke up with another headache, annoyed, but with only one him in his head.

“Congrats,” Mick said. “You’re no longer brainwashed.”

“Just left in the past to die,” Len countered and watched the pain wash over Mick’s face.

“I can’t change it, Lenny,” Mick said, regretful. “But you end up a better man.”

There was a flash and things… They got fuzzy. When they cleared, he was staring out at the water.

His lips tingled like they’d been kissed.


	21. Hurt/Comfort [Coldwave] - Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Coldwave, h/c

He’d been in love with Mick since he was sixteen. It wasn’t like the movies with one big, significant moment that made the lightbulb go off. It was…quiet. Slow. Years of comfort and friendship until he’d realized that, oh, that was what being in love was supposed to feel like; like friendship, but more.

It was the least dramatic thing he’d ever done.

He never told Mick. He swallowed it down over the years, burying it under snark, one-night-stands, and people he could have grown to love if his heart was big enough for more than Mick and Lisa. He didn’t need it, didn’t need the drama and the inevitable rejection and the loss of the one person that had come into his life and held on.

When Mick burned, it was like something inside Leonard had died. Shaking hands and panic attacks that took him so far out of himself, he thought he might never come back. Running. He ran and kept running, because he couldn’t face that he’d gotten Mick hurt. His plans had been flawed. They’d put Mick somewhere he knew his partner wouldn’t willingly walk away from.

“I’ll let the world burn,” Mick had told him once, voice far away as he stared into his lighter’s flame.

“What about you?” he’d asked.

“I’ll burn with it,” Mick had replied with a smile. “Right down to ashes.”

He ran for two years, but in the end, he always went back to Mick. He went back with a present that promised Mick’s destruction as much as his own. He went back with words that were too cool but covered up the hammering in his chest.

Mick never let him see his scars. Len knew where they were, had poured over medical records Lisa had stolen from the hospital after he’d fled Shreveport. His shoulders. His arms. His chest. And Mick, the guy that used to walk around their safe houses with jeans and nothing else, suddenly kept himself covered in ways that were more like Len than himself. Layers. Long sleeves. Gloves.

They didn’t talk about it.

They pretended it wasn’t there, the same way they’d always pretended Leonard wasn’t hiding a patchwork of scars under his own clothes. Pretending was easier.

When Chronos happened, Len wished they’d never left Central.

He went to Mick’s quarters after they’d dropped their younger selves at the Refuge, ready to tell Mick that, never mind, they should just go home. Fuck everyone else. He couldn’t do this anymore, felt like his anxiety was going to kill him before the Time Masters could.  _Alexa_ , he wanted to tell Mick,  _abort_.

Mick was shirtless when he came in, halfway to reaching for a new Henley, but he froze. They both froze as the door slid shut behind him. Len sucked in a breath. Mick clenched his jaw. Neither of them flushed, but Len almost wished he could so Mick would understand that he wasn’t disgusted. That he didn’t care about the scars. They tore something in him to pieces, but it wasn’t disgust.

He should have said it, should have reminded Mick that he wasn’t the only one with scars. That he wasn’t the only one  _ashamed of them_. His voice wouldn’t work, but his eyes did, moving carefully over the burns and the other scars etched into skin. Didn’t ask about the ones that still looked fresh and could only be from his time as Chronos.

He didn’t  _talk_.

He swallowed thickly and locked his eyes on Mick’s as he shrugged out of his jacket. Shoved his sleeves up to his elbows. Scars. Cigarette burns.

Mick starred back at him, new shirt clenched in his fist as he walked over. He dropped it halfway there, both hands free as he took Len’s arms and looked. Thirty years of friendship and he’d never let Mick see, had wrapped himself up in clothes that were more like armor, because he hadn’t wanted Mick to see the weakness.

He hadn’t cared what his one-night-stands felt in the dark. They hadn’t mattered.  _Mick_ mattered. His opinion mattered.

He forced himself to stay still as rough fingers brushed over an old cigarette burn he couldn’t remember getting, but he almost jumped back when Mick turned his arm over. Almost ran, because he didn’t want Mick to ask about the long scar that ran from his wrist to his elbow.

Mick’s breath shook, but he didn’t ask. His hand curled around Len’s wrist tighter in response, like it was the only thing he could manage. Len carefully didn’t think that Mick’s hold was the only thing keeping him from running like a coward.

He reached up with his free hand as the silence stretched, touching at the scars across Mick’s shoulder. They were rougher than he thought they’d be, extended down over his back and up his neck into the space his collars usually hid. His fingers curled around them, holding on in something that was too intimate for them and the thing Leonard never talked about.

Mick’s eyes moved up to his face, staring, and Leonard spared a second to think how ridiculous it was that he couldn’t speak. Words had never failed him so completely before, but even with only his forearms exposed, he felt stripped bare. He thought Mick might have seen it, might have understood, because something in his partner’s face shifted. Gentler. A question Len couldn’t understand.

He understood it when Mick kissed him, that the glance towards his mouth had been him asking permission. That he’d taken the chance anyway.

His hands drifted to Mick’s belt as they stumbled back towards the bed.

Hands roamed. Eyes took in every mark.

Afterwards, Mick traced the belt marks etched into Len’s back with the kind of attention Len usually reserves for memorizing blueprints.

Leonard shook to pieces all over again.


	22. Zari Did Not Sign Up For This [Coldwave] – Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Len keeps showing up throughout history, trying to get the Legends' attention. Problem is, the only one he runs into is Zari, who has no clue who he is (pre- or ignoring- Leo). Bonus points for emotional Coldwave reunion.

The thing is, he’s not always aware. He’s lost somewhere in the colored swirl of the timestream, weightless and floating. He’d tried pushing himself in a direction, but it’s like swimming through drying cement. It’s slow and his muscles burn in ways he didn’t think they _could_ , because he’s not even sure if he’s got a body anymore?

He doesn’t really remember what happened at the Oculus. There was the flare of pain up his arm and a light, but… That was it. He doesn’t know if it’s his soul that’s lost, body blown to bits, or if all of him had gotten thrown out into…wherever he is.

There’s not much he can do about it and, mostly, he sleeps. He floats through the white noise of it and lets every part of him drift away.

Usually, he wakes back up to the timestream lit up around him.

Other times, he wakes up in real places. Times. His brain is always foggy when it happens, slow to fully understand, but…

He can hear the Waverider. Every fucking time, he can-

He runs the second he has control of his limbs, searching for Mick and willing to take anyone if they can find a way to get him _out_. He’d even accept Ray. He thinks he’d actually be _happy_ to see Haircut at this point and, shit, maybe the first thing he needs to do when he gets home is call his shrink.

But he doesn’t find them. He runs and he searches, but the only person he ever meets is a girl. Pretty and dark-haired and with a necklace that looks more like heirloom than fashion. He considers stealing it once, but the girl brushes by him like he’s nothing and keeps going.

Somewhere around the sixth time it happens, he learns her name is Zari.

The eighth, he hears her muttering to herself in what he’s pretty sure is Persian.

The ninth, he swears at her in the same language, because swears are the only thing he learned from Amir Nazari when they were cellmates in Iron Heights.

That time, she stops and gives him a wide-eyed look that’s as much surprise as offence. “ _Excuse_ me?”

He doesn’t repeat himself, mostly because he’s not even sure what he said. He’d only mostly guessed she’d been speaking Persian because the sound of it had brought up an old memory of Amir. Whatever he said… He was always better at remembering insults than he was the actual _translation_.

“You gotta tell Mick-”

The world flickered and went out around him like a bad television set.

By the fifteenth time, he thought she was actually keeping a conscious eye out for him.

“Who are you?” she asked the second she caught sight of him. “You keep showing up-”

“Len,” he said shortly, because he never seemed to have much time when this happened. “Ask Mick. The Oculus-”

The sixteenth.

“He won’t talk about you. I said your name and he threatened to set me on fire.”

“I’m alive. I think. The timestream-”

The seventeenth.

“I’m _stuck_. Ask Stein. The nerd-types know this shit-”

“He’s dead,” she told him and Len went still. “Attack on another world.”

The eighteenth.

“Who the _fuck_ is that?” he squawked when he caught up with Zari again and she was with his apparent twin.

“Leo,” she told him as Leo stared and Len grimaced at the old nickname. “From Earth X.”

“I’m a _ghost_ here?”

“I’m not fucking dead-”

The nineteenth.

Mick was with her this time and Len let out a noise that sounded like a wounded animal.

“ _Mick_.”

Mick shook his head hard, muttering about hallucinations.

“He’s not,” Zari said quickly. “He keeps showing up-”

“The Oculus,” he cut in. “I’m stuck in the timestream. I was looking for you and kept finding _her_.”

“I’m trying to help you, you ungrateful-”

The twentieth.

He opened his eyes and he was standing in some kind of circle out of a bad Supernatural rip-off. There was even a guy in a trench coat.

“Our resident wizard,” Mick said from behind not-Castiel.

“I’m not a _wizard_.”

Zari rolled her eyes at all of them. “Introductions later. He doesn’t have long.”

“The circle anchors him here,” the guy said. “If you’d let me do the spell-”

“Have you even tested it?” Huh. She actually sounded a little concerned. He was pretty sure he was growing on her.

“Not a bit,” the guy admitted cheerfully and resumed the chanting Len had heard when he’d woken up.

It hurt. One second, he was coming apart at the seams and, the next, he was getting stitched back together. The phantom pain in his arm—the one he’d felt when the Oculus began to blow—came back and he thought he might have yelled.

Zari had to hold Mick back from rushing into the circle with him.

He was on his knees by the time it stopped, left arm held desperately to his chest and forehead pressed into the floor. His throat felt raw.

“Did it work?” Mick asked, shaken.

“He ain’t disappearing, is he?”

“I tried touching him before,” Zari added, a little more helpful than Scottish Harry Potter. “He was only kind of corporeal? You can try-”

Mick was beside him before she could finish, hands heavy on Len’s shoulders as he pulled him back up and against his chest. “You _bastard_.”

Len huffed quietly, lips quirked up. “Should be used to it.”

Mick’s lips pressed hard and fast against his temple. He didn’t let go of him for a long time.


	23. Mutual Pining [Coldwave] - Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terrayoung prompt: Coldwave + mutual (and eventually resolved?) pining, please?

Len fell in love with Mick when he was fourteen. At least, he was pretty sure that was when it happened, even if he’d been too young to understand it at the time. The realization had come on his eighteenth birthday, though, when Mick showed up at the house and a cheery happy birthday and you’re moving in with me. Len had still been busy trying to process what Mick had been saying, but Mick had started building moving boxes to toss his stuff into.

The shock faded slowly, an awed smile on his lips, and he had a moment to think that, shit, he loved Mick.

Then, he was promptly asking Mick what the fuck he meant he was moving in with him.

He’d never planned to tell Mick. He…thought he might have seen a yearning in Mick too, but it was something they didn’t talk about. First, it hadn’t been the time. Mick’s family had only died a few months before and Mick had bigger things to worry about. Then, Len ended up in prison for the first time. Then, Mick did. Then, there was Lewis stuff and Lisa stuff and… Time passed. The thing they didn’t talk about turned into the thing they never talked about.

It was…probably for the best, Len thought. They came together and drifted apart in a dance that was too dysfunctional for something real. And Len was a mess. He knew he was a mess. He was barely a functioning adult. Getting him to take his shirt off was harder than cracking a safe. He didn’t understand people on his best days, breaking them down into questions and probabilities in a way any person he ever had dated found creepy. Mick put up with it because he was used to it, but that didn’t mean he’d feel the same if Len was more than his weird criminal partner.

Years bled into decades and they didn’t talk about it. Lisa always looked at him with sad eyes that made him squirm and told him he looked at Mick like he was an ex Len was still in love with. “And you never even dated,” she’d sigh, ready to say more if he didn’t shut her down every time.

The fire damn near killed them both. Mick, from the burns. Len, from the heartbreak.

The Flash came – along with a stupid little crush that came and went as fast as Barry’s fetish suit would let him run – and they came back together, no longer criminal partners, but super villains.

Lewis.

Prison again.

The Rogues – who started calling him and Mick Mom and Dad like even they could see what was going on.

Rip.

The Waverider.

Chronos.

Len would have shot himself through the chest with his own fucking gun if he’d thought that would fix things. If he’d thought that could save Mick.

But Chronos shifted back to Mick and Mick wasn’t the same, but he was still Len’s in all the ways he’d ever been. He’d been grateful, ready to finally tell Mick how he felt and deal with whatever the consequences of it were, because they’d already wasted so much fucking time.

The Oculus came before he could.

He was never quite sure if it was death or not, that time he spent lost, but he woke up eventually to Mick’s face hovering above his, pale and panicked and real.

“Fuck. Lenny…” Mick’s voice cracked as a gloved hand cupped Len’s cheek. His skin shifted under the leather as he gave Mick as much of a smile as he could muster.

“Hi,” he murmured.

Mick went to pieces, tears and gasps of Len’s name. He kissed him somewhere in between and finally did what Len had never had the balls to do.

“How…”

“Think the universe was pissed we waited so long,” he said, voice hoarse.

Mick gave a watery laugh and kissed him


	24. Jealous!Len [Coldwave] - Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Coldwave fic where it takes Mick flirting with someone as part of a heist for Len to realize he has feelings for him?

Leonard Snart was a petty, possessive asshole. He knew that. He accepted that. Lisa might have shaken her head at him and Mick might roll his eyes halfway out of his head about it, but facts were facts. He cared about very few people and the ones he let in? If they were in, they were in. He protected his own and maybe he was – definitely – a bastard about it, but he made his stance clear.

The fact was, though, that Mick had known what he was signing up for when he agreed to being partners. He signed up for the headaches and every last one of Len’s quirks.

Which…fine. Maybe Mick hadn’t quite expected Len to be so judgmental about the people Mick took home. Or about that guy in Saints & Sinners that kept asking Mick to play pool so he could watch _Len’s partner_ bend over the table.

Mick fucking knew what the asshole was doing too. That amused grin of his said everything.

Len was used to it. He didn’t _like it_ , but he was used to it.

He was less used to Mick being the one on the grift for jobs. Most times, it was Len playing the con while Mick played muscle. Others, they’d pull Lisa in if the job needed a woman’s touch. But they didn’t usually have Mick in a three-piece suit – loose tie and top buttons undone, because Mick was wholly incapable of buttoning a shirt fully – and conning some woman in a form-fitting gown.

Len should have been the one on the grift, but no. Lewis’ last surprise visit meant Len was laid up with a busted leg and even more busted ribs. Mick had had to take over rather than risk the opening to get in with the woman that curated the art museum in Opal City.

Who, as it happened, seemed to like Mick.

He watched the feed from Mick’s button cam, scowling, as she laughed and ran her hand down Mick’s arm. Stupid and typical, but Mick was _giving it right back_. He kept bending his head down to hers and the angle of the camera gave just enough space for Len to see his hand on a narrow hip.

“Her key card is in her purse,” Len reminded him, irritated. “Not on her ass.”

Mick snorted into his scotch and had to cover it up with a flimsy excuse she still fell for. Idiot. Down the wrong pipe. Lisa wouldn’t have fallen for that when she was _four_.

“I already got it,” Mick grumbled into his comm when he stepped away to get them both a new drink.

“Making a night of it, then?”

“You’re the one that said to play it natural. It ain’t like I could pick it and run. Security would be on my ass in a minute.” Damn it, he had a point. “So shut up and take your meds. You’re bitchier than normal when your ribs are broken.”

Then, he turned off the button cam.

He fucking _turned it off_.

“I can still hear you,” he reminded Mick, peeved. “There are _rules_ -”

“One point of contact at all times when split up on a job. I _know_ , Len. Jesus.”

He sat there the rest of the night, blind and listening to Mick flirt with the curator, all high-pitched giggling from her and low, rumbling chuckles from Mick. The ones that said he was truly amused and, excuse you, those chuckles were usually reserved for _Len_. Not that he could tell Mick that, because pointing out specific laughs and claiming ownership to them was a level of crazy that Len wasn’t even sure _he_ wanted to touch.

Even if they were his.

Mick knew Len didn’t like sharing.

It wasn’t like he’d go home with her, though. He’d already played a risky game by staying with her for so long after taking the card. If she’d realized…

It was a relief when Mick told her goodnight and walked her to the valet station to get her car.

So Len was not still pouting when Mick got back to the safe house with the once-loose tie completely undone and his shirt hanging open by a few more buttons. He wasn’t. The pouting was over.

“Are you _still_ pouting?”

Fine. Maybe he was still pouting a little bit. “No.”

Mick rolled his eyes at him the same way he always did when Len was being especially insane. “Uh-huh. I’m gonna get out of this.”

“Surprised you didn’t have her help with that.”

“Maybe I wanted you to,” Mick shot back with the same benign flirting he’d always done. It drove Lisa crazy. She called them ridiculous.

“Not tonight, honey. I have a headache,” Len drawled.

Mick disappeared into the bedroom with a bark of laughter and Len almost asked if he’d _wanted_ to go back with the woman. Almost. Not that it would have mattered, because Mick didn’t usually go home with people Len didn’t approve of. That Len _knew_ of, he corrected suddenly as something in his stomach twisted. It wasn’t like he was glued to Mick or that Mick really _needed_ Len’s approval for a hookup. Mick was no monk. He met people and went home with people, but he came back to Len. Which mattered. Somehow.

Even when they were pissed, they went home to each other eventually, he thought as he stared at the closed door. Home. Because safe houses were safe houses, but with Lisa off at college, Len’s idea of home had become pretty damn centered on Mick and-

Huh. He…might be a little in love with Mick.

No wonder Lisa said he was ridiculous.

Or…they. She said _they_ were ridiculous.

“Len? You  alright?” Mick’s voice came and Len blinked himself free of the questions that had started popping up in his head to see… Yeah. Sweat pants and a wife-beater that answered the question _do you find Mick attractive_ with a resounding _hell yes_. That suit had looked really good too, if out of character for him, but this… _This_ was Mick.

Fuck, he was screwed.

“Are you in love with me?”

Mick went still. And a little pale. Maybe a little panicked. “ _What_?”

“You flirt-”

“-so do you-”

“-and Lisa says we’re ridiculous-”

“-it’s _Lisa_ -”

“-and I think I’m in love with you, so two plus two equals ridiculous. I think.”

Mick’s mouth snapped shut so quickly that Len heard his teeth clack. It sounded like it hurt. “You’re in love with me?”

“Signs point to yes,” Len replied, a little curious. “It’s a new feeling. I’m not used to it.”

“Because you hate most people.” Mick knew him so well.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Mick’s Adams apple bobbed as he swallowed, but he came and sat on the coffee table next to the couch Len was extended on. Fingers interlaced. Bent forward to put his elbows on his knees. “I don’t flirt with you for your witty combacks.”

“I thought you liked my comebacks,” Len said, maybe a little wounded. “They’re _clever_.”

“They’re really not.”

“ _I_ thought they were.”

“You also love puns. You’re not a good judge.”

“You love me,” Len accused. “You wouldn’t put up with me if you didn’t.”

“No,” Mick admitted and quirked his lips up into a tiny smile. “I wouldn’t.”

“Well,” Len said. “Good. So we both do.”

He could work with that. 


	25. Different Earths AU - Part 1 [Coldwave] - Rated T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Coldwave, a Len from an Earth where Mick died at the Oculus runs into our Mick

**Different Earths AU [Coldwave] – Rated T**

The thing was, he’d always known Mick would die in a blaze of glory. It would be big and impressive and the fire would burn bright the way Mick loved.

But Mick would be dead and Len would be alone.

He’d nearly gotten himself killed when he tried to run back in after him, already prepared to take Mick’s place, because Mick _couldn’t_ die. Not here. Not like this. Not on a mission Mick hadn’t wanted to be on in the first place. Not ever. Len knew they were a mess, complicated and dysfunctional, but Mick had been his whole damn life since he was fourteen and he didn’t know how to face a world where they wouldn’t come back together eventually.

He’d always told himself he’d be the first to die, selfish as it was.

But the explosion went off when he’d barely gotten back inside, shockwaves coming before the flames. Sara screamed his name and might have threatened to drag him back herself, but…

It was too late.

The realization hit him and he knew. An explosion with Mick in the center… He was gone. There was no pulling him back and getting him out. It wasn’t a matter of Gideon healing some burns and regrowing a limb. He knew what explosions did to bodies when they were the ones with their hand on the trigger. He knew…

The world went quiet around him, muffled and numb and it was like everything had just…stopped. Broken. Tiny hands on his arms that should have made him flinch. Fingers pressed to his pulse point like they were trying to see if he was okay. There was a thrum of blood pulsing under their fingers, he was sure, but he felt dead.

It was his fault.

Someone—he was never sure who—got him back onto the ship and he stared dazedly out the window as the Vanishing Point came apart in a series of explosions.

It was beautiful, he thought as his knees went out from under him.

Mick would have loved it.

 

 

He left them to kill Savage without him. He should have gone with them, taken revenge out on the man the Time Masters had been helping. Savage had just as much a hand in killing Mick as they had.

He didn’t go. He couldn’t pull himself out of the fog that was half grief and what he only sort of heard Lisa calling dissociation. Someone must have called her. Maybe the Flash. Barry. Cisco. Someone. Not Mick. Mick wasn’t calling her. He wasn’t calling anyone.

He ate when people made him, but mostly, he slept. Sometimes, he cried. Others, he screamed.

“It’ll be okay, Lenny,” Lisa promised him, voice tear-clogged and weak.

He squeezed his eyes shut and wished she wasn’t lying.

 

 

He got back on his feet eventually, but he wasn’t _okay_. He’d never done well without Mick. Jobs were too risky. He was a little too brutal, skirting too close to the kind of callousness Lewis used to have.

All trace of the Legends disappeared six months after Mick died.

Len didn’t look for them.

 

 

Three years, four months, one week, and six days after Mick died, he walked into Jitters.

 _Mick_ walked into Jitters.

Len’s fingers curled around the cardboard cup of hot chocolate with cayenne and marshmallows—a Heatwave—so tight that he thought he’d crush it in his grip. He stared, sure he was starting to hallucinate again and that he was going to have to call the shrink Lisa had forced him to start seeing, but-

Mick looked as shocked as him. As wide-eyed. As pale.

He looked like he’d seen a ghost when he _was_ the ghost.

They ended up at a table in the corner, backs straight and hands holding onto cups like lifelines. Neither of them spoke for a while. Len’s drink went cold.

“Which Earth is this?” Mick asked finally, his voice all gravel and stressed in the way that said words were hard right then.

“Nine,” Len said, because he’d known. He’d fucking known it wasn’t the same Mick. He’d seen too many doubles walk around Central to think he could be that lucky. “You’re-”

“-one,” Mick finished. “You died at this place. The Oculus-”

“ _You_ died at the Oculus,” Len corrected. Maybe stated. He couldn’t make his brain think. “I wasn’t fast enough-”

“You took my place,” Mick said and there it was. It was the answer of what would have happened had he been that much faster. He would have died for Mick. He _should_ have died for Mick, who had spent his whole life saving Len.

“I tried-”

“I _hate you_ for it,” Mick snapped. Len went still. Mick’s eyes were lit up, angry and hurting and… Len understood. Mick hated his Len for dying on him, for taking his place and leaving him alone. He still loved him, but he also hated him a little bit.

“I hate you too,” Len admitted, because he doesn’t think that angry part of him will ever go away. He loves Mick more than he hates him, but it’s there.

Mick gave a sharp nod and turned his eyes down to his drink. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Are you?” he returned. It was as much of an answer as it wasn’t. They both had the dark look lurking in their eyes, a tiredness that went too deep to fix. Some things, you just don’t get over.

Mick snorted and that was that. They didn’t talk. Len didn’t ask why Mick was on Earth-9. They stared into mugs of cooled drinks until Mick’s comm went off and he replied with a gruff affirmative. Sad eyes met sad eyes and they knew it was goodbye. It was for the best. This Mick wasn’t _Len’s_ Mick any more than Len was Mick’s Len.

It didn’t stop them from a single kiss in the dark corner of Jitters. Mick’s gloved hand cupping the side of his face as Len curled his fingers into the front of Mick’s shirt. Lips pressed against lips, closed and hurting, because it was like they were saying goodbye to different people more than to each other.

“Be careful,” Len whispered, because his Mick or not, he needed to know there was a Mick alive on another earth. It might help him sleep better.

“You too,” Mick mumbled back. He swiped his thumb across Len’s cheekbone once and, then, he was gone.

It wasn’t closure, but it was the closest he’d ever get.


	26. Different Earths AU - Part 2 [Coldwave] Rated - T

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Godaof221b prompt: If no one else has said it... Prompt: Coldwave, Earth-9 Len decides that any Earth with Mick is better than the one he's on.
> 
> Anonymous prompt: E-9 Len and E-1 Mick meet up again and travel together? (Inspired by your latest post/response.).
> 
> I got two and they kind of bled together, so...

Earth 9 _burned_.

He’d gotten used to Barry showing up at his apartment, awkward and reluctant whenever he asked for help. A bad guy here. A too-wild Rogue there. Len turned him down every time. He didn’t _care_ , hadn’t cared about much of anything since the Oculus and Mick and dully promising Lisa that he wouldn’t off himself. He wasn’t quite sure that he believed him and he was pretty sure Team Flash had bugged his place, but whatever. The most they’d ever hear was him gasping awake in the middle of the night because he was dreaming of Shreveport or the Oculus.

Sometimes, he wondered if that was why Cisco had trouble looking him in the eye and not because he and his girlfriend seemed to be courting Lisa.

Then, the world shifted. It was like everything had shifted three inches to the left and, suddenly, people were in power that hadn’t been. People were dying. A new world order, their rulers would say in the way that made Len’s skin crawl.

Cisco died first. Then, Caitlin. Cynthia. Barry. Body after body kept falling, bodies strung up like warnings that death would follow if you thought to put on a mask.

Lisa died in his arms while she choked on her own blood.

For the first month after, he’d expected the Legends to come and fix things, but Sara’s and Ray’s bodies got hung like twisted piñatas and Len couldn’t find it in him to be surprised when the others followed. Jax. Stein. Rip. Kendra. Battered bodies of people he didn’t know, but their rulers did and they _boasted_.

People died until everyone was too scared to fight back and, eventually, the rulers turned on each other. War and blood and Len barely slept for weeks as the echoes of bombs going off kept him awake.

His home became a wasteland in the span of a year.

When a breach opened, he didn’t think twice about stepping through it. Anywhere was better than a world ruled by the Legion.

He stepped out into a field where guns were going off, but a flash of flame and a bark of his name made him duck just in time.

Mick was staring at him when he looked up, but it was the other one. Earth 1, he remembered. The coat was the same and the gloves were black instead of the dark red his Mick used to wear.

“Nine,” Len told him before he could ask. “A breach opened-”

“We’ll get you back,” the other Ray told him, cheerful and helpful, as if he thought Len would want to go back.

“No thanks,” he said shortly and held his hand out to Mick, expecting a backup weapon. The gun that got pressed into his grip shot bullets instead of ice, but it was good enough. He shot an advancing werewolf— _what the fuck_ —between the eyes and gave Mick a disturbed look. “You get those a lot?”

“Don’t ask,” Mick advised with a long-suffering look.

Len just shot another werewolf that… Yes, that werewolf had vampire fangs. Okay, then. 

 

He told Mick about his earth later, hands curled around a mug that held more bourbon than hot chocolate. Mick listened, knuckles white around his own beer bottle, and skin gray when he told him about Lisa’s death.

They’d both needed a minute after that.

But the story came and the tears didn’t, but Mick’s knee was pressed against his own by the end.

“I’m sorry,” Mick murmured, like speaking any louder would break them both to pieces.

Len only hesitated a few seconds before he put his hand over Mick’s. “It happens,” he replied, but didn’t think Mick would appreciate him pointing out that the whole thing proved Len should have been the one that died. Far as they could tell, their worlds had been near-mirror images, splitting at their alternate selves dying at the Oculus.

Len died and Earth 1 lived on.

Mick died and nothing of Earth 9 was left standing.

“What are you gonna do?” Mick asked him.

Len didn’t have an answer for a long time.

 

 

In the end, he stayed, if only because he had nowhere else to go. The Lisa on this earth had hugged tight once, but he wasn’t her brother and she wasn’t his sister. It wasn’t the same. He couldn’t replace her Len any more than she could replace his Lisa.

“Don’t die, alright?” she told him as they parted. He hadn’t been able to resist the need to pull her in and kiss her forehead.

“You too,” he murmured into her hair before he let her go.

“He’s not him, you know,” she said when he was halfway to the door. He turned back to her, frowning, and she continued on. “Mick. He’s not the one you lost.”

“I’m not his Snart either,” he agreed, because he wasn’t going to try and make this Mick fit in the mold of his. Their old wedding ring sat on a chain around his neck in the same way it would until he was rotting in the ground. As horrible as they’d always been with words, it was something that couldn’t be replaced with a body double.

She nodded like he’d said the right thing. “Don’t die.”

He gave her a ghost of a grin. “You too.”

 

 

These Legends were different with their strange combination of family and strangers. They tried, but they moved around each other like they were still trying to figure out how to let people in. The ones he recognized looked at him with the same kind of sad look Lisa had given him when she first saw him, because he was wearing a dead man’s face just as much as he wasn’t.

Mick called him Lenny and resolutely didn’t call him Len, like if he did, he’d be skirting the line of losing himself between the one he had and the one he’d lost.

Len still called him Mick, if only because he could never say Mickey with a straight face, but it seemed to work out. They fell into a rhythm that was as familiar as it wasn’t. Mick kept the old cold gun stored away and Len let Ray help him build a new gun that fit closer to the specs of the one he’d had on his own earth.

He took a kind of malicious glee in killing Damien Dhark when the opportunity came. Demons and daughters and Dhark drowned in his own blood the way Lisa had.

“Closure?” Mick asked him later when he caught Len scrubbing blood from under his nails.

“Close as it’s gonna get,” Len replied, because that was his reply to most things these days. Questions about Mick. About Lisa. About the things and the people he’d lost. Everything would always be a little different than how it had been, good enough to settle something in him, but not quite enough to let him _forget_.

He thought he liked it that way.

 

 

Their first kiss was a mess.

The room was dark. Mick’s lips tasted like beer. Len’s tasted like salt and tears.

Technically, it wasn’t even their _first_ kiss, but that kiss outside Jitters was long past and hadn’t even been about them. It had been them kissing their real partners goodbye as much as they’d ever be able to. A sad attempt to lay some feelings to rest and move on.

Len wasn’t sure they’d ever really manage it, but they both kept _living_.

They barely looked at each other for days after, confused and ashamed, because how could they? Falling in love again was going to happen—and, God, that was too heavy for a first kiss, but his gut knew what his heart didn’t want to admit—but it felt like a betrayal to his Mick if he moved on with a different version of him.

“I’m not him,” Len told him when a mission got them trapped in a basement for hours.

“I don’t want you to be,” Mick replied plainly, but there was amusement lighting up his eyes. “Turns out, I’ve got a fucking type.”

Len snorted out a laugh. “What? Leonard Snarts?”

“Pains in the ass,” Mick corrected. “Apparently, I find it cute.”

“It works,” Len said, lips quirking. “I think I’ve got a thing for gruff assholes.”

 

 

It wasn’t the same. Their histories were almost identical up until a certain point, but it was the things that happened after that changed them. Len secluded himself a little more and held onto the ones he cared about a little too tightly. Mick spoke up in ways his anxiety used to never allow.

They were different people, he realized one day when he was staring out into the time stream and searching for another him in the swirls. The ones they’d lost and the ones they’d found, because Len had never been Len without Mick in the same ways Mick wasn’t quite Mick without Len. The combination was different, but it was a home they were building from the ashes of broken lives.

“You good?”

Len glanced at Mick’s reflection in the glass, fingers falling from the ring around his neck. “Yeah,” he said and knew he was telling the truth. “I’m good.”


	27. Laundry Day [Coldwave] – Rated K+

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophiainspace prompt: Coldwave - Leonard and Mick do laundry.

There are reasons Leonard Snart is not allowed to do laundry:

  1. As Mick said, he was a godless heathen that didn’t separate his darks from his lights. Forget the fact that all he _wore_ were darks, but Mick had never gotten over the way Len’s black sweater had bled color onto his light gray Henley. Len had liked it. It looked like a goth’s attempt at tie-dye. Mick had made him sleep on the couch for a week.
  2. He always added too much soap. They’d been banned from a lot of places, but Len’s pride and joy was telling the story about the laundromat in Opal City that had their pictures on the wall. Mick still called it The Incident. Len couldn’t say bubbles without cackling. Lisa thought they both needed therapy.
  3. Len always forgot to clean out the dryer filter and set a different laundromat on fire. Mick had been less mad about that one, but Laundry City in Keystone wouldn’t let them back in either.
  4. Mick was fucking _anal_ about how to fold jeans while Len was happy to just shove them in a drawer until he needed them.



The thing was, no one had told the Legends that Len wasn’t allowed to do laundry. The first time around, Mick had kept up with their usual rhythm, but then, Len had died and come back to life. Things were taking some adjusting. Mick had other things he was busy with and Len had figured he could help at least a little. If he could survive an explosion, he could survive doing a load of clothes.

Or he’d thought he could. Right up until the heat of the dryer ignited Mick’s jacket that was flammable in ways a pyromaniac’s clothing should never be.

“We need to talk about that jacket,” he told Mick when his partner came in and found him with a fire extinguisher and a very dead dryer.

“Yeah,” Mick said flatly. “It’s the _jacket_ we’ve gotta talk about.”

“You never said I couldn’t do laundry.”

“It was in the _vows_ , Len. _In sickness and in health and so help me God, promise me you will never touch the laundry._ Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” Len muttered. “But I also died first, so the _till death do us part_ cancelled out the laundry bit.”

“You didn’t die. You literally took a two-year nap in the timestream.”

“I’ve heard it both ways.”

“ _Leonard_.”


	28. Chapter 28

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt: Coldwave - has Mick hurt himself with his lighter before Enter the Jungle? If so, how did Len help him through it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning this chapter for self harm and a referenced eating disorder. Also, these two are dysfunctional and the way they deal with things is not how people actually should deal with these matters at all, so please do not follow their example.

Lisa had always said they were too much alike; self-destructive meets self-destructive. Len pushed himself to and past the edge of too much, body too skinny to be healthy, and an unsettling apathy to keeping himself alive. But the fire… The fire consumed Mick.  It was a compulsion and an addiction in the same breath that he felt with an intensity Len didn’t think he’d ever fully understand. He tried to, but the same ways Mick couldn’t quite get why Len lost himself to his plans at his health’s expense, Len couldn’t quite fathom why Mick loved something that would be the death of him.

He’d known it from the beginning, staring across the juvie’s infirmary at his savior and watching as he flicked a lighter that wouldn’t light.

“It’s empty,” he told Len when he caught him looking. “Pyro. Shrink told them to let me keep an empty one.”

“Does it help?”

One shoulder lifted up in a shrug. “Better than not having it.”

Three days later, Len lifted a working lighter off a guard and presented it to Mick.

Hours later, he watched Mick hold the flame so close, his skin burned.

“Mick!” Len caught him by the wrist and pulled the lighter away from burning flesh. “What the hell?!”

Mick blinked like he was coming out of a daze and gave the mark on his arm a blank look. “Huh.” No surprise. No disgust. Just…simple observation. Like it was normal. Like he was used to it and-

Oh.

The burn scars made a little more sense now.

Len’s breath shook.

 

 

It wasn’t the last time he watched Mick burn his skin away.

 

 

“You aren’t gonna stop, are you?” Len asked him hopelessly as he tended to a burn with practiced hands. Too many burns. Too many years. Things that shouldn’t have become routine had.

“Are you?” Mick returned with a pointed look at the callouses on Len’s knuckles.

Len flinched under his gaze and reached for the burn cream. “You could have just said no.”

 

 

Shreveport fell apart.

Mick burned.

The sense memory of the smell meant Len didn’t have to stick fingers down his throat anymore.

 

 

The cold gun was a comfort, like it could save the both of them from the flame if he tried hard enough. It did as much as it didn’t. The first time he watched Mick’s lighter drift too close to his skin, he lost it. Mick was by his side when the world came back into focus, one hand rubbing circle on his back while Len stayed bent over the motel room’s toilet.

Heavy breaths and sobs and Len couldn’t understand his own words, but he thought he was begging Mick for something. To stop. To  _please_  stop, because  _Ican’tIcan’tIcan’t_.

He might have told Mick about the rest; about the vomiting and the shrinks and the hospital stay and Lisa pleading with him to stop before he wasted away to nothing. About trying to get better and that he doesn’t know how to do that if he has to watch Mick burn himself away.

He was still shaking when Mick got him back to the bed and wrapped him up in his arms.

“I don’t care about fixin’ me,” Mick said, voice rough as he kneaded at Len’s scalp with his fingertips, “but you need me to do it for you, I will.”

It wasn’t right and it wasn’t the way any shrink would approve of trying to do this, but neither of them had ever been poster children for mental health. They were dysfunctional and messy in all the ways they shouldn’t be. But Mick wasn’t burning himself and Len wasn’t throwing up and… They could make it work. They’d make it work.


End file.
